Old mongrel dog, check.
Faded corduroy couch, check.
Twenty-year-old television that won’t be replaced until the screen’s gone so green, you can’t tell what football team is playing, check.
Old mongrel husband, parked on the couch in front of the TV, check.
All 235 pounds of Hank Buford sprawled across the couch. He had his own checklist going.
Bowl of chips, check.
Remote to switch between games, check.
Mini-cooler full of frosty beer, check.
It’s Sunday morning, football season; he’d stay there for the better part of the day, moving only to scratch parts that shouldn’t be scratched in the company of a lady.
Hank yawned, gave himself a good scratch and farted simultaneously, as if to second the motion. Sometimes he lifted his leg for good measure, but this time he kept still, letting the harmful stench do all the talking.
She went back to the room they shared for the last thirteen years and surveyed herself in the full-length mirror. June looked good in her Sears duds.
She'd put on the light pink sun dress with little yellow flowers, the one she wore when Hank was forced to take her out in public. The dress nipped in nice and tight, emphasizing her tiny waistline, one of her better features.
She slipped on her black coat, buttoning it to the top. She didn’t want to be answering questions about why she was all duded up in her fancies. But by the time she made her way back to the living room, Hank added snoring to his parade of bodily functions.
She jotted a note…
Gone to market and the farm. Be back around dinnertime.
Love June
Writing the word love was as automatic as brushing her teeth in the morning. There was no love to it, but there was the lulling calm of repetition. This was what a wife of thirteen years might say in a note to her reliable, hardworking husband.
June headed out the door, confident that when she returned, everything would be exactly as she left it.
The sun sat high in the pre-noon sky, but every few seconds the wind would kick up a cool breeze, like someone was opening nature’s cellar door. She put the car in drive and headed for the Gas n Go Truck Stop, forty-five miles almost to the inch outside of town.
This would be the last time she’d go to the truck stop for the next three months. There wasn’t a high risk of being recognized, but why take the risk at all?
No matter how pathetic Hank was, he was a man, and his ego wouldn’t take being the source of scandal in a small town. He’d have no choice but to uproot and leave, taking her only source of income with him.
The sun reached its apex in the sky as she pulled into the truck stop parking lot, bathing the faded exterior in a glow that intensified the decrepit state of the Gas N Go. Each crack and peel of faded paint amplified in the burning glory of the early afternoon sun.
From the looks of the vehicles parked at the truck stop, it didn’t look like today was going to be her lucky day. She never picked up truckers and she could spot a criminal on the lam a mile away.
What June was looking for was the business man passing through town, looking to forget the wife back home for a few hours. Or maybe the newly divorced middle-class biker heading to nowhere in particular.
But there were no bikes in the parking lot and only two cars; a mini-van complete with a stick figure family decal on the window, and a silver VW bug with a rainbow sticker on the back bumper. The rest of the vehicles were big rigs.
She spotted the owners of the mini-van and the VW bug the second she entered the truck stop. A family of five, harried wife, oblivious dad and three sticky handed children sat at a booth in the far-right corner. Two men of the same-sex persuasion sat at the barstools, keeping things “straight,” less a homophobic local decision to make an example of them.
A few part-time prostitutes peppered the front entrance lobby. The rest of the inhabitants were truckers, deep fried in their own mix of fast food and Marlboro Reds, a stench barely masked by their cheap colognes and Irish Spring. To her relief, none looked all too interested. She would not waste her quarterly thrill on a walking coronary.
She sat at a booth in the corner opposite of the road trip family and ordered the chicken salad and iced tea. She’d eaten over half of the chicken salad and sipped down two full glasses of the iced tea before she spotted her potential suitor.
He was a tall glass of cowboy flavored water. Perfectly toned, but not like he worked out, more like he was no stranger to work. He tipped his hat at the lounge lizards near the entrance, but he kept walking and didn’t seem interested in what they were selling. He strutted with intent.
She closed her eyes and thought about what he might smell like. Imagined what it would be like to nuzzle her nose into his neck, taking all of him, tasting his skin with her tongue. A man like that would make it hard to go home.
For the briefest of moments, she imagined him whisking her away to a life where it was improper for a man to even say fart in front of a woman, whether or not she was a lady. A life where she’d fall asleep to the smell of the cologne on his neck.
June opened her eyes and pushed the thoughts away. Momma always said a shiny man was only good for one thing, looking shiny; reliable is the real prize.
She had her man, but how to get him to notice?
Her mind worked through several scenarios that worked in the past. Most of the time, she didn’t have to do more than smile as she passed by, but she sensed the cowboy was different. The purposeful stride and steady forward gaze said two things: he was difficult to distract, and he liked to take the lead.
She finished her salad, stealing side-long glances at the cowboy and by the time she’d paid the bill, she’d worked out a plan. She would be the damsel, and he’d naturally want to relieve her distress.
He’d taken a booth along the pathway to the exit and as she walked past the booth, she stumbled, knocking into his table, spilling his coffee all over the place.
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I just did that.” She grabbed some napkins and dabbed at the mess.
The cowboy stood and smiled, “No worries, ma’am.”
She chuckled, “Well, I’m not quite a ma’am, now am I?”
“No, I don’t suppose you are.” He smiled.
She furrowed her brow and let her knees buckle out a bit underneath her, and he reached
out to grab her before she could tumble.
“You ok? Have a seat here and let’s get you some water.” He said, guiding her into the seat across from him. Then, before she could thank him properly, he jetted off to the server station and came back with a glass of water.
She drank from it and batted her baby blues for good measure. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I think I’m coming down sick or something. I was driving back from the singles breakfast at the church when I felt peckish. Those things make me so nervous that I can’t really eat, so I stopped for a bite.”
His eyes went to the wedding band on her finger and the smile faltered, but just barely.
“My, um, husband, died a few years ago.” She twirled the wedding band around her finger. “I don’t wear it all the time, just sometimes you know.”
“Oh, sorry to hear that, but you probably shouldn’t be wearing it at a single meet.”
She giggled. “I suspect you are right.”
“So you’re single
then, any children?”
“Not that I know of.”
They both laughed at this, and she was pretty sure she had him.
“Can you excuse me? I have to use the restroom.”
She rose, and he rose with her.
“You won’t run off, will you? At least have coffee with me?” he pressed.
She had him for sure. “I’ll be right back.”
When she got back to the table, she found her coffee waiting and her cowboy frowning.
“So, you aren’t looking to date, then?”
“I believe in fate. I don’t think that any church mixer is going to speed things along. If you’re meant to meet someone, you will, but you’re right, this isn’t helping.” She slipped the ring off of her finger and put it into her purse.
That doesn’t bother me, she thought, which was the same thing she thought each time she went off on an excursion. That should bother me.
He smiled, and she wondered if maybe Momma was wrong. Maybe reliable isn’t all it's chocked up to be.
The cowboy extended his hand, “Michael. Some people call me Mike, but I prefer Michael.”
“I have always liked the name Michael, a biblical warrior. My name is June.”
She said her real name so easily that she was startled by her own honesty. This was one of the cardinal rules of her indiscretions. Never, ever, give them your real name. But there it was, her real name, out there in the wind.
His food came, and he ate, while they talked about everything from his occupation (traveling farm equipment salesperson) to Woody Allen movies (neither of them saw the humor in them) and it all seemed so natural. They were like two friends who met to catch up on old times. It wasn’t until he’d paid the check and walked her out to her car that she remembered why she came here.
Lost in her thoughts, she stumbled a little as she stepped off the curb, which might have been fate, because if she hadn’t, she doubted Cowboy Michael (not Mike), would do anything more than exchange phone numbers with her and send her on her way. He wasn’t that kind of guy.
What he was was the guy to open her door for her, help her into the car and offer to follow her home, since she was obviously still woozy. He did all the above, and she was sad for the last bit. She kind of wanted to hold on to this memory, the tender sweetness of it all, instead of the memory of the grunting and grinding in the little house behind her parent’s farm. She liked that part too, but this one was like an antique doll you wanted to keep behind glass. Pretty to look at, but you never really wanted to take it out and play with it, less you ruin the beautiful exterior.
June put the key in the ignition as a wave of nausea, and dizziness washed over her. Maybe it was the chicken salad or the artificial sweetener in the tea, but she didn’t trust herself to drive home alone. She took Michael up on his offer to follow her to her parent’s farm, just seven short miles down the road. Then she’d send him on his way.
When they arrived, she took the back entrance to the farm, avoiding the main house altogether where her parents were no doubt sitting on the back porch, enjoying a glass of lemonade. Instead, she headed to the small house at the edge of the farm by the creek, the old slave quarters.
Back when it was the slave house, the building had been sturdy but unadorned. A shell of bare wood with a kitchen and one bedroom. June and her father fixed it up over the years, painted the bedroom her favorite color, uptown red, and put in modern fixtures and windows. They even built a bathroom onto the back. He wanted her to have some place to go when she needed a break.
She pulled the car up to the side of the house and Michael pulled in behind her. When she stepped out of the car, she fell forward, smacking face forward into the dirt.
The next thing she felt was her body being lifted into the air. Michael was carrying her to the house, asking her something about keys.
“No keys,” she said, but it sounded funny in her head like, “no teeth.”
He nodded and smiled. He was more handsome up close, and he did smell of cologne. The smell should have made her smile, but her stomach heaved and she struggled to keep from decorating Michael’s button down with a rerun of her chicken salad. Then she was on the bed in the red room and there was nothing but sleep.
When she woke, her head thumped out a drumroll of pain. She reached to rub her temple, but he’d tied her hand to the bedpost.
She looked around the room for Michael, but she was alone. He hadn’t left. The secluded shack was ideal for whatever he had planned.
No one would wander by; the woods were thick with brambles, and the ground produced nothing but sorrow. Unless Hank called looking for her, no one would have reason to suspect she was here.
She was now a prisoner in her own haven; the one place she felt free enough to be herself with the many men she brought here over the years. The irony wasn’t lost on her, and she laughed.
Michael came into the room, wiping his hands on one of her grandmother’s hand towels.
“What in the devil are you laughing about, June? I wouldn’t suspect you would feel like laughing right about now.”
He was smiling, but now it looked anything but gentlemanly; this was the smile of a predator who liked to play with his prey.
“Ohhh, if you only knew how hilarious this whole thing is. How long was I out?”
“Well, you should have been out for at least two hours, but it’s only been a little over an hour.” He was still smiling, but there was something else in his eyes. Doubt, suspicion, she couldn’t tell, but he was definitely confused.
He sat in the rocking chair facing the only window in the room and said, “Normally, I take my dates out in the wilderness, but this works much better. Pretty cozy. I’m not sure about the choice of paint for this room. They say that red is the one color you don’t want to paint a bedroom, it gets you all jazzed, makes it hard to sleep.”
“A date huh, is that what you call this?” She said.
“Well, something like that.” He winked, just sharing an inside joke between friends.
“I do little sleeping in this room. Besides, I like red. It matches my nature. What do you want from me? Please say it isn’t something as boring as sex. You seemed so much more interesting than that.”
“Maybe what I want is your life?”
“If that was all you wanted, you would have already taken it. Maybe you like to play, or maybe you are a sex pervert after all.”
Michael’s smile fell away; his eyes were two angry slits. She’d gauged him correctly; he liked the fear game. He wanted her afraid, something she just didn’t have in her.
He leapt across the room. And she shifted to avoid him. Her dress rode up on her thighs, revealing that she was bare from the waist down. She made no attempt to hide her naked mound.
“I told you, red matches my nature.”
“Why, you ain’t nothing but a common whore.”
“Well, I never said I was a lady.”
Michael gritted his teeth, narrowed his eyes and pulled at her dress, trying to cover her body, but he stopped. Something caught his attention. He leaned in and examined her eyes, looking first at the left one and then the right.
“Well, I’ll be dipped in horse shit. I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that your eyes were a bright deep blue, but damned if they aren’t… What’s that color? Kinda orange and brown. What is that color?” He wasn’t really asking her, more ruminating out loud, but she answered anyway.
“Amber.”
“Hot damn, yes. Amber, your eyes are amber. That is just fucking weird.”
June gave an exaggerated yawn. “What is weird is you are busy worrying about the color of my eyes, when you should just get on with whatever it is you plan to do.”
Michael walloped her across the side of the face and eagerly awaited her frightened response, but she only laughed, harder and louder this time.
The blow split her lip. June slid her tongue out and licked the blood. “Unless, of course, you aren’t able.” She looked down at his prick when she said this.
He leaned in close, his beard brushing against her cheek, and whispered, “I usually like to keep my girls intact. Preserve their beauty and good nature forever, but I’m going to bash your fucking brains in and leave your body in the river out back. Let the birds and coyotes pick at your insides. How about that, you smart ass, nasty bitch?”
She was weak and the drugs he’d put in her water left her with a slight tremble she felt down to her core. But his smell, not the cologne, the smell of the blood traveling through the highway of veins beneath the surface of his neck, gave her just the push she needed to begin. She closed her eyes and let the smell carry her into her transformation.
She bit down hard, and her teeth bit deep into the meat of her bottom lip. The taste of her own flesh pushed the change into overdrive. Her nostrils flared wider and his scent became an intoxicating symphony of smell in her head, building to a frightening crescendo that sang, eat, eat, eat, eat!
Her heart quickened in her chest and the blood rushed to her eyes. The thin scarlet veins in the whites of her eyes expanded, squeezing the black pupils out to pinpoints. Her engorged eyes shot open and her jaw unhinged. She opened her mouth wider than seemed humanly possible and sunk her teeth into the ripe fruit of his neck.
“GAAHHHHHHHHHH,” Michael howled and pulled back instinctively, leaving a chunk of his neck in her hungry jaws.
He stumbled, one hand clasped over the mortal wound in his neck; his life, blood spurting between his fingers. His feet caught in the carpet and his legs flayed out, trying to catch balance. He looked like a giant cartoon cowboy doing a sloppy backward running man, still he did not fall. Michael shot the bloody hand out to find anything of substance to break his inevitable fall.
He found purchase on the wall and leaned against it.
Without the hand to stem the flow, the blood streamed out of his neck in thick, forceful spurts. With each beat of his slowing heart came a fresh mahogany fountain.
The entire room filled with the smell of copper and urine. A heady mixture that brought June to near climax.
She chewed slowly, indifferently, waiting for him to drop, but he just stood there, a human sprinkler system. His eyes met hers and he stared at her as the blood slowed to a trickle. He was stronger than any man she’d ever seen breathing his last, and she’d seen plenty.
His lips parted, and his tongue clucked against his teeth. He furrowed his brow and pressed them back together, then parted them again, for the last time in his brief life.
“Demon,” he said, then his legs gave, and he slid to the floor. The one hand painting a slick, almost unperceivable trial on the red wall.
His eyes never left hers and she stared back into them until death stole the last of their sheen.
When she was sure he was dead, she pulled against the ropes until they snapped. She bounded off the bed and pounced on Michael’s body, lapping at the blood. The adrenaline had pumped out the last of the drugs that remained in her system and the small morsel of flesh energized her.
“No,” she says, lapping at the blood in-between her sentences.
“I am just as human as you are, Michael. Maybe even more so. My people discovered long ago that the secret to longevity, strength, vitality and control over the human form was right there for the tasting. The right amount of flesh in your diet and you can bend your body to your will.”
She grabbed his face and lifted until her live wire amber eyes were staring directly into the vapid dead blue of his eyes.
“Are you paying attention, Michael? You don’t want to eat the brains or organs, of course, that leads to crazy, but this right here,” she said, pinching his bloody cheek, “has all a body needs to reach its full potential on the evolutionary scale.”
She took a bite from the cheek and chewed with vigor this time. “And it ain’t half bad raw.”
Once she’d had her fill, she pushed the bed to the side, revealing a floor hatch underneath. She opened the hatch and the chill of the air from below brought a spattering of goose bumps along the surface of her skin. There was a set of stairs leading down into the darkness below.
She lifted Michael’s body off the ground and threw him over her shoulder and carried him down into the darkness.
She did not need light in her this heightened state. She could see everything around her just fine. Butcher table, complete with mallets, bones saws and assorted skinning knives. A meat grinder and sausage press attached to the end of the table. Assorted chains with large leg shackles at the end hung from the ceiling.
She laid Michael’s body on the ground and hooked the shackles around his ankles. She flipped a switch on the wall and his body ascended feet first into the air until his head was a foot off the ground. Then she went to work with the knives.
When she finally left the cold storage room, she had two rump roasts neatly wrapped in pink butcher paper under her arm and a season full of meat packed into the freezer. She closed the hatch, replaced the bed and got to work cleaning up the room.
There was a lot of blood but no more than her other kills, and she had the entire place back to order in under an hour. She put the sheets and bloody towels in the wash with extra Borax and went about the business of putting herself back in order.
She showered quickly, relishing the last few moments in her natural state, and as she dried off, she let her body shift back to its June form.
She was losing daylight, and Hank would worry if she didn’t make it back soon. No time to stop and chat with mother and father. She would call and let them know about the fresh kill when she got home. Father would need to get rid of Cowboy Michael’s truck, and Mother would need to hang the laundry before it mildewed.
She headed back toward the main road, the slave shack shrinking in her rear-view mirror. As she drove, she hummed Nancy Sinatra tunes and reflected on the events of the last few hours. One thought in particular brought a smile to her face.
“I guess he gets the red room now.”
She laughed and turned right on the main road, happily returning to her reliable life.