We Are the Vampire's Wife

By H Christopher

Charlotte Vorobyev, the youngest of three Romanian siblings and the only one of the family to grow up outside of Cluj-Napoca, returns to the place of their birth six centuries later with a letter and a mission: they believe their eldest sister, Maryanna Dragavei, wants Charlotte to kill her for abandoning them in Russia when they were only two years old. In order to track down Marya, Charlotte seeks help from their brother, Dmitri, an exotic dancer at a male revue, who sends them on a wild goose chase through Cluj for clues to their older sister's whereabouts.

But when violent urges run their course, in the midst of a crumbled family history renewed by proximity, Charlotte begins to have second thoughts about enacting revenge. Even if Marya wants to die.

"We Are the Vampire's Wife" offers a view into ultimate familial responsibility: when family is quite literally the only thing guaranteed to outlive the centuries, how does one learn to forgive its inevitable mistakes?

I offer this book up for free to anyone who wants it, and I hope it's an enjoyable read. For the next two years while I'm doing grad school, I'll be taking my own work very seriously--poking it, prodding it, doing a thesis, etc. I wrote this so I could have some fun before beginning the program. It's supposed to be pulpy, imperfect. Ultimately, it was an experiment in self-care and preparation for writing other, longer works, and a return to free writing. I started my own journey as an author on platforms like Fanfiction dot net and Wattpad, and I don't want to neglect the importance of free art now that I'm making a little more money doing what I love. Stories belong to everyone, no matter their financial means. I wouldn't be nearly as capable a person as I am today if not for free content creators who worked their rears off to deliver writing for diminishing, or no, returns.

I'm not ever going to charge for this piece of fiction. I'm not Romanian, and I don't want to profit off a depiction of that culture. It'll end up being falsifying in some way, no matter how much research I poured into making it as authentic as possible, so please take my perspective with a grain of salt. If you're curious about Romanian culture and fairy tales, check out Petre Ispirescu, Herta Muller, and the Romanian Cultural Foundation's "Plural" literary magazine, among other wellsprings of knowledge.

Also, the style of this book was heavily influenced by my favorite lesbian author, Jeanette Winterson, so give her some love, too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: H Christopher
• Release date: Aug 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005945503

H Christopher

Hannah is a writer from Akron, Ohio, currently living in Seattle and attending the University of Washington's MFA in fiction. Their short fiction has been published in The Threepenny Review, Gordon Square Review, Delay Fiction, and Little Patuxent Review, and has received nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Their nonfiction has been published by Eastern Iowa Review, and their first novella, 'No One Dies in Palmyra Ohio,' is forthcoming in October 2022 through What Books.

Book preview

We Are the Vampire’s Wife

H. Christopher  2021

"Within you I yearn for no one,

Earth set in sleep

Through green orbits,

And I’m foreign if I cross the boundary

Of your tired locks.

Your language alone

I know how to speak in dreams

…Night closes in,

Time comes down slowly,

But it’s so fine and warm at home,

When we are one another’s country."

-Ana Blandiana Country

LITTLE BATS

Primăvară

You may know our family from pictures. We’re the youngest daughter, Cicielia Dragavei, usually obscured by the shoulder of my eldest sister, Maryanna Dragavei. But in the L’Style write-up, we’re front-and-center. By that time, the public had mostly lost interest in the disappearance of our mother, our sister, and our brother, and us.

We traveled for several decades between Moldova and Russia, eventually traversing the Siberian wilderness until Khrebet Kolymskiy and the Sea of Okhotsk with our wife, Lada. We went with a small team of biologists—all dead now—in search of a species of bat we only suspected existed based on satellite images and microscopic flakes of skin tissue stuck to fossilized bone fragments. We can quote the exact words of the resulting peer-reviewed article Lada published upon returning to Saint Petersburg. We know it by heart because Lada knows it by heart, and we have long dwelled together in this one body. We go by Charlotte these days. We’ve moved back to the city of our birth, to Cluj-Napoca. Have lived here for a negligible handful of weeks.

#

Cluj-Napoca is a cesspool. It used to have Babes-Bolyai University, and the botanical garden. It used to have St. Michael’s Church and Banffy’s Palace. From above, before the explosion, you’d recognize the capital of Transylvania from its beautiful red roofing tiles, like sunset on water or strong-brewed rooibos tea.

Sometime when we were travelling hand and knee through the tundra, a positive-loop power factory detonated due to human error. A supposedly infinite source of atomic energy in one half-second obliterated thousands of years of my family’s history. The only structure to sustain no damage was the City Hall, a flat rectangle of yellow brick, quickly reappropriated by historians as a museum in our father’s honor.

Most new buildings and renovations were made hastily, from concrete-composite and rebar. City planning committees occasionally add additional floors to some of these structures as populations increase. But, for the most part, its skyline is gone. The parks have nearly entirely reclaimed the outskirts of the city.

#

So you’re wondering what brings us back to Cluj-Napoca in the first place. We suspect we’ve been called home for a family reunion of sorts. We’ve managed to avoid notice. Maryanna has not made an appearance, though we came by her invitation and waited for any acknowledgement of our presence. None came. But we frequent the blind spots of the city, and know for certain now that Dmitri, the only Dragavei son, still lives here. Or else has been summoned back same as we have and waits for similar news of what’s to come.

#

The census records don’t list Dmitri anywhere, but the phonebooks do. He earns his keep in exchange for his talents at one of Cluj-Napoca’s many gay clubs. We knew of the club by name even before we learned he danced there. How could we not know? Gazdă Cerească. House of Angels. If you know it by hearsay, you know it as the Rollerstrip, Romania’s only revue on wheels.

We’ve never been. As two women, especially as two women attracted only to women, nothing lured us to sightsee at the Rollerstrip when first we heard of it. To be fair, a lesbian equivalent likely wouldn’t have garnered our attention, either. We don’t get out much. We don’t put stock in traditional notions of fun.

-It’s just that our pleasure-centers light up given unusual circumstances. Scientific method dictates the lives of its religious dedicants.

Do we prescribe to notions of religiosity?

-Hypothesis is theology. That’s religiosity, dear.

Okay.

-Let’s not argue.

Okay.

#

Gazdă Cerească opens when the men leave their desk jobs, when the factory lines expel their low-rate hands, the assumption being that those hands will rest for a full six to twelve hours and come back to the lines the following morning prepared for the arduous work ahead of them.

We watch the men file in the front door. Gripping and palming their cocks through the pockets of their trousers.

-Natural selection. Name another species less likely to reproduce.

We’re married. We’re women.

-My point stands. The human species is self-destructive.

We’re only half-human.

-Which half?

And so the argument goes. Where does one wife end and the other begin? The lights in the open doorway of Gazdă Cerească flash in lines and end abruptly in pebbled shadows. The high reek of sweat pours from the Rollerstrip thick as an oil spill.

We stand in the queue, our identification ready in our hand when the bouncer gestures for it. We’re not the only women in the building, but the others clustering together in sticky booths and near the vaulted stages are hard to make out in the dim.

-Do you think we even have anything in common with those women anymore?

Did we ever?

We can’t conclude that we ever have, even individually, felt sympathetic to the plights of other women. Even other lesbian women. Certainly, the dim women in sticky booths and near vaulted stages here are not of our kind. The Rollerstrip is a gay bar. It isn’t meant to appeal to us.

It does, however, appeal to our brother.

-Solidarity is sweet, isn’t it?

#

Of course, he hasn’t changed since we last saw him. Hundreds of years ago in the old Dragavei castle. In guessed-at pictures and artist’s renditions. He’s buzzed his hair. His presentation is gossamer and dark, like the songs we used to like in the post-war years. Look at him snakewalk backward. He rises vaporously onto one of the raised platforms, hooks his slender left leg on the pole, and leans his knees and hips into a sensuous spin. This is theatrical sex. This is the kind of fantasy one might easily transpose themself into, if so inclined. Half-moon shadows dance across the muscular planes of his arms as he pulls his heels out all too easily into a full vertical split parallel to the pole.

We watch until the song fades into another. Dmitri glides onto a higher catwalk without acknowledging us, stopping only to take several leis from an outstretched hand with his teeth. Now that he’s gone, we feel an uneasy tension let go of our body.

A man with curls in his hair pays close attention to our discomfort. He waves us to the plush chair beside him. Empty. For us? He nods. He wears a dress shirt and a knit sweater with an androgynous cut, gray slacks rolled up above the knobs of his ankle. A bolo tie holds his collar in place. This strikes us as an unusual choice for Cluj. But he is harmless, probably. We sit where he encourages us to.

The man with curls in his hair angles his chin in our direction. In the neon and vapor, his complexion is smooth, even cherubic. His cheeks flow undisrupted into a round chin, round like a molehill, sitting below his perfectly moisturized lips.

Which one is your favorite? he asks. We see the fullness of our face in his eyes. His eyes are dark even when flashes of light catch on his irises. Black or brown eyes. We have been told we maintain a stoic face, neither youthful nor wise, and we try our best to confirm or deny this when possible. Young people used to call this на сложных щщах.

We cannot say what our first face looked like in reflections. We never knew.

-I saw.

We tilt our ear.

-You were beautiful then, too. I am always in love with you. Even and especially in this place, where I am reminded of my biological imperative to only ever fuck women.

Charming, we say. But the man with curls still listens, so we add, We don’t play favorites. Not at a male revue.

Speak for yourself. I’m partial to Dmitri. He’s been dancing longer than anyone else I know. I can get you closer,

Really? He’s old, we say. The man with the curls pressed his lips together in a thin smile. We like his dancing in a strictly technical capacity.

-Our turn to smile.

We lift the left corner of our upper lip with our pinky fingernail, revealing a moonlike fang. His face remains unchanged. With our free hand, we run our fingers over his shirt collar. Pull down gently on the starchy fabric. The bruises and wounds we know from time, from love, from the days and nights when those two facts hovered always slightly ahead of us, possibly fungible but impossible to cash in on. And now. We let our lip snap taut over our teeth once more.

We’re family of his.

I understand. I’ll be right back, promise.

Thank you.

He departs into the fatty rolls of simulated fog, returning only when the song patters lightly into something bright with synths and horror with Dmitri, sliding along with the downbeats on his luminous roller skates. Up close, his hair is short enough to see patches of his scalp. Weird divots in his cranial architecture. He smirks at us. We think he means to be polite with this show of attitude. It is a form of customer service here. He wears only a silver thong and a pair of fake wings. A wire the breadth of babies’ blonde hair rises from the wings, holding a halo above his head which gives off an eerie white glow. It reminds us of public bathrooms.

He waits for the man with curls to resume his seat next to us, then throws himself upon the man’s lap.

-This is a show. He’s testing our faith, isn’t he? He doesn’t know?

Of course, he doesn’t know how alike he is to his sister.

Dmitri was never handsome. He has our mother’s sharp cheekbones. They protrude below his eye sockets and thin immediately out into what Lord Dragavei referred to as, when he passed his only son in hallways, an urchin’s face. Lord Dragavei used to agitate Dmitri by dropping coins into his empty bowl at suppertime or asking him whose bed he’d bargained his way into for half a night’s sleep and leftovers gone cold. Dmitri never retaliated. He played the part of level-headed heir deceptively well. I believe Maryanna loathed him for it.

He shows us a winning smile. As an angel passes, he swings an arm out and grabs a flute of something glittering. He offers it to us. Well, he says. He’s clearly luxuriating in his second chance at a first impression. What can I say? Daddy was right about me.

In what way? we venture.

I hate to say it, but I’m a cocksucker.

Why do you hate to say it?

Because you’re my sister, Ci.

Charlotte.

Oh? He drains the flute in time to grab another, still not breaking eye contact. He says again, Oh. I see. Marya paired off, too, you know.

We didn’t know. Who’s your friend?

The man with the curls manages to free an arm. We shake hands like businessmen. Asher. Ashe, for you Romanians. Boyfriend or partner, whichever you like.

You’re not Romanian? we ask.

He shrugs underneath the weight of our brother. Well, we can’t all have pure blood.

I like your blood better, says Dmitri, mouthing Ashe’s ear. Pure blood. Isn’t it bullshit, Charlotte? Who’s in there with you, anyway? Some Romanian urchin? Or some fucking Danish twink from Marya’s illustrious court?

We don’t like referring to one another individually.

Huh? You’re a fucking psycho.

Charlotte is a portmanteau of our individual names. Cici and Lada. She’s Russian, born in Saint Petersburg. We’re married.

Dmitri’s peasant face opens up. I always knew I liked you more than Marya. Big dyke energy, huh, sister? Well, the tit-loving gene had to go to one of us. I’m relieved it was you. I can appreciate the aesthetics of massive knockers but ask me to suck on one and I’m as good as dipped. Out the door. Dust cloud, like in the cartoons.

Okay.

You’re no fun.

We’re not here to have fun.

We regard one another for a moment. We feel the synths punctuating our heartbeat behind the thin skin of our temples and above the bridge of our beaklike nose.

You sound like our sister, says Dmitri. "Of course you’re not here for fun. You’re here