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Summary:
You are a normal person, with a normal job, living a normal life. But you can't eat normal food; instead you have to drink blood. Your body can't produce it on its own any more, not like normal.
In a normal society like this one, your abnormality will be your undoing.
Rating: Mature (for themes)
No Relationships; Original Characters
Important Tags: POV Second Person, No Happy Ending, Vampirism as Disability, Ableism, Internalized Ableism, Homelessness, Mind The Tags
(Mood: Hopeless. Describes the story, not the author.)
You sit down on the hard concrete of the bus stop seat, legs shaking, breath heaving. Just walking the few blocks from your job to the bus stop exhausts you after several hours on your feet. Your vision is going fuzzy. Your head is pounding. You need time—time to sit and breathe and recover—but the bus comes too soon and if you wait for the next one you’ll be waiting an hour and your parents will lecture you again for being late.
So you stumble to your feet and onto the bus. Your legs are still shaking underneath you, and you slump down into the nearest seat, resting your head on the vibrating Elderly Disabled Pregnant sign behind it. You can feel people giving you dirty looks (they always do) but you have no energy to address them, or to change seats. Every bump and turn of the bus jostles your exhausted body. You have no energy to fight them either.
When the bus gets to your stop—far too late, far too soon—you push yourself back onto your still-shaky legs and stumble out. The few blocks to your parents’ house feels like an eternity. You have to sit down multiple times before you pass out. Your stomach feels like it’s caving in. It takes far longer than it should to get to the door and slump down into a chair in the kitchen.
Still, you should count yourself lucky. You still have a job, even if it’s one that’s nearly too physically demanding for you. Your workplace and your parents’ house are both within a couple blocks of a bus stop, which is rare in your city; there’s simply not a lot of funding for public transit. Your parents are still letting you stay in their house, despite the constant reminders of how you should be “independent” and the financial strain of giving you a room.
And—most importantly—you’re lucky that someone will give you even just a fraction of the blood you need, even if she resents you for it. Even if she’s only doing it because she’s your mother.
She comes down the stairs and sighs when she sees you slumped over, breathing hard, trying desperately to get enough oxygen despite the fact that you don’t have enough blood right now to carry it. “Again? It’s been, what, four days?”
You think you need blood every day. Multiple times a day, maybe. Like how normal people need normal food multiple times a day. But you can’t tell her that you need more blood on a regular basis than she has in her entire body—she’d just accuse you of being ungrateful again. So instead all you do is whisper a quiet, defeated “Please.”
“Fine,” she huffs. She takes you to the windowless laundry room (“I don’t want anyone to see what my child has become”) and lets you sink your teeth into her arm with a hiss of pain. The taste of blood fills your senses. You want it, crave it, need it. You’ll finally be able to catch your breath. You’ll finally be able to move around without passing out. You’ll finally be free of the empty hunger you carry with you everywhere. You need—more, more, more—
Your mother has to kick you in the stomach to get you off of her. You’ve been bad again. You lost your head, took too much in your fervor. It wasn’t enough—you still can’t quite catch your breath, that hunger is still there—but that’s not what matters. What matters is you took too much.
She goes into the kitchen without a word to bandage her arm, and you sit on the floor of the laundry room and try not to cry. For once in your life, you just want to be full.
“Get up,” she tells you when she’s done. “And make sure to come to dinner this evening. Your father and I have something to tell you.
Dinner looks delicious—or it would, if you could eat it. You can’t. You’ll either throw it back up (with half the blood you took today, blood you need) or shit it out (again with half the blood you took today), your entire digestive system evacuating everything in it in a panic.
You’ve told your parents you can’t eat normal food. They still put it in front of you. They still expect you to eat it.
Slowly, under the weight of their gazes, you pick up your fork and bring the smallest, most innocuous piece of lettuce you can find to your mouth. They aren’t satisfied until you swallow. (You didn’t really swallow anything, of course. The piece of lettuce is still in your mouth. You can’t risk throwing up the precious little blood you have in your stomach.)
“You’re not going to like this,” your father warns. “But it’s for your own good.”
You can feel your anxiety spike at those four cursed words: for your own good. Nothing that’s claimed to be “for your own good” is good for you, and that’s gone double since you’ve become what you are now.
Your mother continues: “We can’t keep you here anymore. You’ll need to find an apartment.”
Your father nods. “I understand this would upset you, but you need to learn to be an independent adult. You’re twenty-two, for God’s sake! I moved out at eighteen!”
“I can’t afford an apartment,” you protest.
“You may need to make some sacrifices in finding a place at your age. You can’t expect to live in luxury; you’re still only starting your career, after all.”
“That’s not—I can’t afford any apartment. I earn minimum wage.”
“That’s more than enough for a decent apartment!”
“No it’s not.” It’s true that you wouldn’t have to buy food, but the only apartments in your price range are old one-bedroom apartments miles away from any bus stops, and even then if you wanted to save any money you’d have to get a roommate. (And who would want to room with a bloodsucker like you?)
“Then work more shifts,” your mother says blithely, like that’s even possible. Like you’re not already straining your limits, being on your feet for four hours a day while you can barely breathe. “You spend so much time laying around at home, surely you can do something more productive.”
“That’s exactly right. You need to learn self-discipline. You can’t just keep laying around.
The accusations choke you. You want to protest, but it’s hopeless—you already know it’s going to fall on deaf ears. Ever since you started needing blood your parents have simply stopped listening to you; all the words they have for you are about “independence” and “being productive”. Which means that there’s no way to stop them from kicking you out of the house and blaming you when you end up on the streets.
“Eat,” your mother tells you again. “You wouldn’t crave so much blood if you got more iron in your diet.”
It’s approaching nightfall, and you have nowhere to sleep.
It’s been three days since your parents’ deadline for moving out. You have few contacts—even when you do have the energy to attempt socialization beyond what your job requires, many people are put off by your constant pallor and heavy breathing—and none of them are comfortable having someone like you sleep in their house. (“What if you go crazy and drain me of blood?” one of them accused, and you didn’t have an answer to that.) You’ve started to show up to work in dirty slept-in clothes, unable to summon the energy to change before hurrying to your shift. You’ve gotten warnings for it too. You were on thin ice before, taking so many breaks to try to catch your breath, and if you show up with dirty clothes again you’ll be fired for your lack of professionalism.
(You haven’t told your boss that you got kicked out of your parents’ house. She’d fire you on the spot.)
You need somewhere to sleep, of course. It’s hard to sleep. Has been ever since you started needing blood—it’s hard to sleep when you can’t catch your breath. But more than that, you need to keep your job, and you need to figure out how to get at the money you have stored up under your parents’ name, and in order to to keep your job you need to find a place to shower and wash your clothes, and most of all you need to find someone to give you their blood, even just a couple ounces. You need to do a lot of impossible things very quickly. You don’t have enough energy to do even one of those impossible things.
One thing at a time. Find a place to shower and wash your clothes so that you don’t get fired tomorrow. Then find a place to sleep near your place to shower.
You could probably wash up in a gas station bathroom, if worse comes to worst, but it won’t be enough for your boss. There aren’t a lot of parks around, and they all close at the end of the workday. You’ve checked. You don’t have money on hand for a hotel, or motel. There are organizations that give help to the homeless, right? But you don’t know what any of them are. Or where. With your luck, they’d be too far from either a bus station or your place of work (or both) to be of any help. If you lose your job you’ll go find one of them. But you don’t really want to lose your job.
Night is falling. It’s starting to get cold. Ever since you gained this condition the cold gets to you far more easily. So does the heat. Your body’s lost its ability to properly regulate its temperature.
You have to lay down in the little patch of grass outside the library because your legs are shaking too bad to continue walking. You haven’t gotten far. Even taking the bus is exhausting. You know there must be a solution to your current issue—there has to be—but your thoughts are muddled and your head is fuzzy from lack of blood and if there is a solution you can’t see it. (The librarians tried to help, bless them, but they didn’t have the resources you needed, and the library like everything else closes in the evening so you can’t sleep there either.)
You’ll just lay here for a bit. You still haven’t found anywhere to wash up, but your body demands rest right now. You simply don’t have any energy left.
You hope you’ll be able to find something in the morning.
You were fired…weeks ago? Months? Days? You don’t have any money. You have nowhere to go. You tried the homeless shelter, but one of the employees threw you out when he realized you could only eat blood. A few of the other homeless people at the shelter was kind enough to give you some of the blood you needed, more than you ever got from your mother, but you can’t find them now. There aren’t any other shelters in the city, either, just soup kitchens serving food you can’t eat.
It’s been a long time since you got kicked out of that shelter, too.
You have even less energy now, barely enough to shuffle out of sight whenever someone kicks out off their property. You move like a zombie. Other people cringe away from the sight of you. At least now you’ve found an alleyway away from everyone else, where you’ve collapsed, where you’ll never have to move again, stay forever curled up in a futile attempt to ease the pain of that incessant hunger.
(If you don’t get the blood you need, you never will move again.)
Out of the corner of your eye you see: there’s a rat sniffing your hand. Somehow you grab it before it bolts away. It squeals in your hand. It’s as dirty as you are. You don’t know if you can drink blood that isn’t human—but the small voice of concern is drowned out by hunger as you bite down.
You taste blood for the first time in weeks. Something’s off about it. You don’t care. All you care about is draining every last drop from the rat. It’s not enough. You scream from the frustration. Blackness creeps into your vision—but before it overtakes you you’re vomiting the blood back up.
And then you dry heave. Once. Twice. Again. Again.
Your body’s finally giving in to the inevitable. You can’t even make yourself move away from your own vomit. The blackness in your vision promises sleep, rest, death.
Sleep sounds nice. You close your eyes and never wake up.
The dinner scene was the most emotionally difficult thing I've ever written and probably ever will write. I haven't experienced a lot of the stuff shown in this piece--I've never been homeless, I don't have a physical disability (although I'm autistic and have ADHD), and I've definitely never been anemic--but so much of the dinner scene is drawn directly from my own experience and the shit in my head that I'm still trying to work through. Food aversions/restrictions being ignored. The "laying around and being unproductive" complex. The way the parents present is as "this will be good for you" when you know it won't be. Not having your concerns be taken seriously in general. Just trying to write it left me feeling bleh.
Yeah, I'm definitely going to write something that hits less close to home for June.
