An Episode of Not Quite Dead.

Episode Content Warnings

Please bear in mind that this show is a work of horror fiction and frequently places characters in situations which jeopardise their psychological and physical health. This episode contains:

– Descriptions of blood

– Threats of death and harm

– heavy descriptions of blood

– Descriptions of decaying flesh

– Descriptions of the experience of a panic attack (describing the feelings felt during the panic attack including racing heart, breathlessness, and panic)

– Mentions of hospitals

– Alcohol use

– Description of violent assault

– threats to kill or harm others

– Scenes of a sexual nature

Transcript

I– I can’t stop thinking about where Casper is. What could have happened that would make it so he wouldn’t come back for this long. He wouldn’t leave me. He can’t. He promised, and this thing between us. Even if he wanted to go, he couldn’t, not now. The blood has bound us together in ways that are to strange to understand.

He told me that he’d never done this for this long, shared his blood with a living person, a living person whose blood he’d also drunk. It’s new territory for him. He didn’t like that. He was careful, usually, and I think that was one of the reasons he’d always avoided this. He’d known other vampires who’d done it, bound human beings to them this way, kept them alive and close. They’d always act like it was this sort of imprisonment of the people they’d chosen, that they, as the vampire patrons, were totally in control of the situation, but Cas said it was obvious they weren’t. The longer these bonds lasted, the more protective the vampires became, the more erratic and violent in defence of the people they’d chosen for themselves. It ended two ways, Cas said; then humans died and the vampires either dead of the heartbreak or else spent eternity mourning the lost, no matter how many new ones they made. Sometimes the vampires tried to make turn their humans, but the passion built into the bond they’d made seem to make them too rash for the change to be successful. It seemed even less likely than usual for the change to succeed. Casper had only ever heard of it working out once.

Just once.

He didn’t like those odds. And honestly neither do I.

INTRO MUSIC. EIRA: This is Not Quite Dead. Episode Six: What Are We?

Sometimes Cas brings up what happened at the hospital as this kind of generous act of faith, something I’d done that spared the life of someone I’d never even met. I don’t know that he really would have killed anyone, though. He’s convinced he was right on the brink but he’d made it all the way to my flat from the hospital and back again without laying a finger on anyone, and he told me once he’d locked himself inside a wine-cellar for six days to stop himself from killing anyone and only came out after he’d heard someone the town over had been taken ill and seemed like they were going to die anyway. He’d convinced himself it would be impossible to break the bolt on the door from the inside, but it wasn’t. He was surprised at how easily he got himself out. He could have left any point, really, and when I pointed that out he just sort of laughed.

After he got out, he made it all the way to the girl with scarlet fever before touching anyone. Even then, he didn’t kill her, not completely. He sat through the night and held her hand. Nobody else could; not with scarlet fever. They’d have caught it too.

To hear Cas talk about it, it’s this awful thing he’s done, but really, he kept everyone safe by locking himself and then went to someone who was about to die anyway, and held their hand when no one else could. That doesn’t sound monstrous to me.

So that day at the hospital, I think he came to me that day because he knew I would let him take what he needed from me. The bond goes both ways. I might not be able to feel his emotions like he feels mine but I don’t know. It’s weird. I can sort of. I can tell what he needs. Especially if I’m the one who can give it to him.

Ehem.

Anyway.

I’m pretty sure that’s why he showed up that day. So I could give him what he needed.

Whatever the reason, though, it was like me giving all that blood to him – blood untainted by the infection I’d got from the half-made vampire that had killed Ben – it solidified things. Not that there’d seemed like there was much option for backing out before then, but there definitely wasn’t one after that.

I remember I woke up in my own bed, not in the hospital. Casper assured me later that I’d been conscious enough to stand up and walk out to my car before he drove me homeCasper was sitting next to me, reading, holding my hand. He let go for moments at a time, to turn the page. When he saw my eyes were open, he got up, but came back a moment later with a bottle of energy drink and a sandwich, which me made me eat and drink the lot of. He sat and read, but I could tell he was watching out the corner of his eye.

After that I just dozed on top of the unmade bed, not touching Casper at all. He offered to leave, but it was nominal. The coolness of his body was a relief in the summer heat.

‘Do you have have anything with a lot of sugar?’ he asked, after what may have been hours, or possibly several short and blissfuly lifetimes. He got up, and I heard him rummaging in mu cupboards before he returned with a four pack of Kinder Buenos. He opened one and broke off a square.

‘Can you even eat that?’ I asked.

‘It’s not for me.’ He held the square of chocolate out until I ate it from his fingers. When I did, he smiled wide and indulgent.

‘If you call me a good boy I’ll bite your fingers off,’ I warned him.

‘Noted,’ said Casper. He handed me the rest of the bar.

‘Seriously though, can you eat people food?’

‘Yes. Some of it is nice, even if doesn’t provide me with anything nutritionally. I grew up with quite a different palate than what you’re used to now, though.’

‘Shit, I never even thought to ask. You’re not like. A million years old, are you?’

Casper scoffed. ‘Not a million years, no.’

‘You’re older than you look, though.’

‘Yes. Though I’m quite young in vampire terms.’

I poked him in the side. ‘So, how old are you?’

‘Two hundred and seven,’ he said.

I lay flat on my back.

‘Does that bother you?’ he asked.

‘I mean, I don’t know. It’s not really an age people live to be, is it, so it’s not. Weird like that. But. Two world wars, man. You were alive with the Titanic sank.’

‘Alfie, dearest, I was alive before they invented electric lightbulbs.’

‘Shit, man. That’s fucking old.’

‘It is,’ he said. ‘You need to eat more sugar.’

I opened another Bueno. ‘I’ll be thirty in September, if you were wondering. Do vampires still do birthdays?’

‘Not really. It starts to lose its shine a bit once everyone you knew when you were alive has died and you’re the last relic of a time everyone around you has consigned to history books.’ He smiled oddly. He took a chocolate bar from the pile and opened it, breaking one of the squares of wafer off and pulling it apart to lick the cream from the inside. I could have watched him do anything and wanted to kiss him by that point, but this, in particular, made the breath catch in my throat. He looked up at the sound and grinned wickedly. ‘Sweet,’ he said. ‘But nothing on you.’

I felt my face flush red in embarrassment and picked at my own bar. I was surprised at how easy it was to be around him. I hadn’t known him long at all. The fear and confusion of it all seemed to make it feel like much longer, and whatever was happening with the blood we’d drunk from one another made the connection deep and strange.

‘What is a really old vampire doing in York, then? Are you from here?’

‘No,’ said Casper. He looked off into the distance. ‘I’m here because of them.’

I knew what he meant right away. ‘Why?’

Casper’s expression was dark and dangerous, and not in the way it has been when he pinned me to the tiles in the bathroom, not even like it had been at the hospital, when he was convinced he was moments away from tearing my throat to shreds. ‘There shouldn’t be so many of them.’

I turned this over in my mind as I finished another Bueno. ‘You think someone’s doing it on purpose? Making them deliberately?’

‘Yes,’ said Casper.

‘Why?’

Casper looked at me oddly, like he was surprised I was interested, like he wasn’t a vampire telling me he’d come to my home city to hunt rotting things whose damage I’d seen first hand. Like I hadn’t been living in the shadow of the violence of those monsters for months. ‘I wouldn’t let them harm you,’ he said.

‘You almost didn’t make it there in time. They killed Ben. They killed so many people.’

‘I know,’ said Casper. ‘But I wasn’t connected with them the way I am to you. If you’re in danger, I will know, and I’ll come.’

‘What if you’re really far away?’

‘The furthest I will be from you is the hospital, and I can run very fast.’

‘It was all over Ben. It took less than two minutes, and it was almost through with me by the time–’

He cut me off by calling my name. His voice was deep and dark and dangerous. The panic inside me stilled under the finality of it. ‘I will not let them have you,’ he promised.

The words went right to my head, made it spin. It felt like he’d proposed to me. It felt like we’d just got fucking married. It felt like more. It felt like– honestly, like too much, like I couldn’t hold it inside of myself, and suddenly I was very aware of the heat, and the smell of his skin, so comfortable and casual before but now felt strange and off kilter like someone slamming at piano keys with their fists. I could just about hear my heart over the ringing in my ears.

A week. I had known him for a week.

In that time he’d saved my life and threatened to take it more times than I could count, had admitted that he’d tried to wipe my memories of him from my mind, that now there was this thing, this huge, frightening thing between us. No. Not between us, inside us, in our blood, our blood.

Casper traced the line of my jaw with his finger, and then pressed hard against my throat, so hard I could feel the blood squeezing past the pressure. My head was swimming. I started thinking insane things. I wanted him to kiss me, to bite me, to fuck me, to drain the life out of me.

I got up, ran to the bathroom, and slammed the door shut.

I put my head between my knees and tried to remember how to breathe.

I could not keep up. He was a vampire. He wanted to kill me. I gave him two pints of my blood without really questioning it. I let him bite me. I wanted him to bite me again. I wanted to see my blood on his lips, feel his teeth in my neck. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want those things to get me. I thought of the awful nuzzling, like a blind kitten seeking milk from its mother, bits of flesh falling from it like its bones were nothing but armature held together with glue. And that thing had been someone, it had been someone. It was desecrated, foul, dead, intent on bringing everything with it. Caspers words rang around my head, a thirst that could never be sated, how it echoed the deep and terrifying wants in the pits of me which were opening up, pits I was right on the precipice of, at any moment was at grave danger of falling into.

Distantly, the thought came to me that I was having another panic attack. I took my hands out of my hair, laid my palms flat on the just-barely-cool tile of the floor. I listened to the hum of the extractor fan and the slight, barely there fizz of the lightbulb glaring up above me.

There was a gentle knock at the door. I moved aside so Casper could open it, didn’t say a word, knew he would know to come inside anyway.

He sat down across from me, not touching, barely looking.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told him.

‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘It’s a lot to process.’

I laughed at that, this horrible, panic laugh that went on for way too long. I pressed my eyes against my knees until I could see stars. I thought about the freckles. I thought about the way he’d looked in the forest, feral, beautiful under the moonlight. I uncurled myself, still shaking a little, crawled across to him.

It was all so much. Too much. But also not enough. I didn’t need to explain this Casper. Casper knew it already. There’s a mistake that’s easy to make here, I think, a temptation to talk about trust. But you can’t really. Trust is something precious. It comes in lots of shapes, for sure, like the trust a child has for a parent, the trust we place in our partners not to hurt us, the trust we give a surgeon who is cutting us open. All trust, in different flavours.

I didn’t trust Casper. Not to stay, not to keep me safe, not even that he wouldn’t kill me, not entirely. You could not spend time with him and not be aware, implicitly, that he was a thing that was designed for killing. The smell of him, the way he moved, the bright white flash of his too-sharp teeth. It wasn’t trust that pulled me to him. It was something else, something manic and wild, an animal thing.

I’d done this course several years back about addiction. It was a weird one, sort of experimental, I think, and most of it was pretty useless in terms of day-to-day nursing, but one thing that stuck in my head was this concept called the death drive, this subconscious need to return to an inorganic state. It was close to that, I think, in those early days with him. Like every minute I was only a second away from asking him to kill me.

ALFIE DRAWS A DEEP BREATH

Trust would come later, bit by bit. Trust that even if I asked him to, he wouldn’t ever do it.

ALFIE SIGHS

I was pretty fragile for weeks after the hospital incident. Not physically; physically I was fine. but I couldn’t leave the house. When I needed to go to work, Casper came with me in the car, every time. He didn’t question it. In fact, we barely spoke at all. Something happened when we’d been sitting on my bathroom floor. Something in me broke. I didn’t know how to talk about it. Casper told me later that he didn’t want to push me, but honestly I just think that he didn’t know how to talk about it either.

I remember feeling jealous that he could tell what I was feeling, that he could apparently smell me out across miles of distance and know exactly where I was. TO me, he was quiet and terrifying. I was living in a contradiction; I wanted to be near him. I needed the reassurance of him, this indestructible thing capable of great violence, I needed him near me to feel safe from the other, worse things I was convinced were now lurking in every shadow, waiting down every alleyway to spring out and claim me. Every time I left the flat, even though he was right beside me, I felt it coil in my chest, the fear, the horror that they might be waiting for me. The solid, quiet presence of Casper at my side kept it at bay but honestly how did I know he would really help? How could I be sure when he said he wanted to, that he wasn’t lying?

In a weird, abstract way I started wishing I was dead just so that I didn’t have to be so scared all the time. Casper listened to me yell it, tried to hold me when I cried. I couldn’t let him, sometimes. Whenever I asked him to leave, he did, and as time went on I made him go more and more, even though it hurt me. Maybe it was because it hurt me. But it was also just to prove I could. I could sent him away and he’d listen. He’d go. It made it feel more solid that he would stop the things from taking me if he did as I asked.

It was all wearing on him. The way I was being, I could tell. As summer drew to an end we were barely touching, barely speaking. Silently he would meet me at the end of my shift, ride with me in the car, walk me to my door, and leave without any pretence that I’d invite him inside. Sometimes I’d stand and watch him go and it felt like something was ripping to pieces inside of me, it was like real pain not to call out to him, to ask him to come back, to hold me, kiss me, sink his teeth into my neck.

ALFIE GASPS

But I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t. So he walked away, I closed the door and sat with my back to it, sobbing so hard my throat was raw and my head throbbed.

More of the victims with torn out throats were in the news. Some of them lived; they always came in on shifts I wasn’t working and I started to wonder if Casper was doing it on purpose, choosing who to save based on what would hurt me less. The rest of them were found dead in bushes and down alleyways, sometimes just a few steps away from where people were talking and laughing outside of pubs and bars. In the staffroom people talked and I knew it wasn’t just me who was afraid; there was a spectre across the whole city, a dark threat whose tendrils snaked in and coloured everything we did. In the news they said fewer people were going out in town. Tourists were becoming fewer and fewer. They started locking the gates up to the walls and sending out more police on the streets. People still died; now some of them were in uniforms.

I didn’t actually see another victim myself until summer was well and truly over. The victim came in dead, the things having torn and ripped at her too badly for her to be saved. They took her straight downstairs.

I spent the rest of my shift thinking about her, knowing what I was going to do, not knowing why I was going to do it, but I knew there was no argument I could have with myself I could win. I waited until the end of my shift and went down to the morgue, where they were keeping her.

It was empty. The lights were off, so I used the torch on my phone. It was still, and cold, and quiet.

She was laid out on the table, covered in a thin white sheet. I pulled it back. Her eyes stared through me, like Ben’s had. Her neck wound was dry, clean, and ravaged.

The door opened. I knew without looking it was Casper. I don’t know how I knew.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

I wanted to ask why he was there but I didn’t. I didn’t even look at him. I stared at the dead woman instead.

Casper said, ‘before this started, it had happened before. Months before. A few people were attacked and killed. You wouldn’t have heard about it because none of them lived long enough to make it to the hospital.’

‘So. They only started living that long after you got here. You saved them, but not enough. But your blood. It saved Linda. It saved me. Why couldn’t it save all of them?’

‘Vampire blood has costs. Drink too much, it will kill you. And then there’s the chance of accidentally making more of them.’

Cas crossed the room. He opened one of the doors on the storage freezers and pulled out the tray. Laying bare and naked was something half-rotted and stinking. Its face was a mess of rended flesh and displaced teeth. There were no eyes to speak of.

‘But you said it only happened when people tried to make real vampires.’

‘No. I said that’s the most common result when they attempt it. The half-made can be born of this other mistake, too. But there’s no chance of making a real vampire that way.’

‘That’s what you meant about people making them deliberately.’

‘Yes. This many of them, if it was a renegade vampire trying to make companions and failing, there would be at least one success by now, but there hasn’t been, and my ear has been very close to the ground.’

‘Are you the only real vampire in York?’

Casper laughed. ‘No. Far from it. But the community here is tight knit. Everyone is angry about the half-made. They’ve been looking for a culprit. False accusations have been made, and the consequences have been brutal. Lives have been lost.’

I nodded. My pulse sped up. I don’t know if I’d been making the assumption that Cas was somehow undefeatable consciously but now the idea of his death was presented to me it was almost too much to bear.

‘We can die,’ said Casper.

I scrunched my eyes shut tight.

‘That upsets you,’ he said.

‘I don’t want you dead.’

Casper seemed at a loss for how to respond to that and a rush of guilt so powerful it threatened to bring me through me knees racked through me.

‘Did you think I wanted you dead!?’

‘I don’t know what you want,’ he admitted. He sounded very small, in that moment. And I realised all at once that despite it all, the teeth, the blood, the everything, there were parts of Casper that were very human indeed, and for some reason this made me furious.

I snapped at him, ‘why did you come here? I’m not in danger.’

‘I know. But I was worried.’

‘Why?’

‘I know they scare you. You’re right to be scared. But I don’t want you scared.’

I tried to bite back the guilt because I wasn’t sure I was capable of putting into words. I could taste it on my tongue, the demands to know why, the need to understand how he’d let me push him away the way I had been with no resistance if he’d been feeling like this. I knew there was no point in asking all of that because as soon as I considered it the answers laid out in front of me, all hidden away in those words. ‘I don’t want you scared.’

Instead of speaking I took Casper’s hand. He shuddered at the touch, his cool fingers closing around mine in an instant. Finally I looked up at him. His eyes were closed, his head hanging slightly back, an expression something frighteningly like relief on his face. All the healed marks he’d made on me seemed to light on fire as I looked at him, barely visible in the light from my phone’s torch, which I still had pointed to the ground.

‘I can’t deal with any of this,’ I said. ‘You’re making me different.’

Casper looked down at me, eyes half-closed still. ‘I’m sorry.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s alright.’

‘You’re making me different, too,’ said Casper.

‘I think I want you to kill me,’ I said all at once.

Casper laughed. ‘I know. But I won’t.’

I gripped his hand tighter. ‘Will you take me home now?’

Casper squeezed my fingers. ‘Of course.’

We covered up the dead victim and slid the half-made thing back behind the fridge door.

At my flat, there was a moment on the threshold, Casper hesitating, waiting for me to tell him to stay or go. I kissed him long and slow. He took both my hands in his and rested our foreheads together, the way he’d done that night in the forest. We sat on the floor in my tiny kitchen living room.

We talked about a lot that night. He told me about where he’d grown up, a small town in what was now the Czech Republic, how he’d been one of the few of his peers who’d learned to read and had gone to the city was he was young to look for work, and eventually became the assistant to an architect. He did fairly well for himself, married a young woman and had two children by the time he was thirty. One night, he’d met a woman named Antoinette. She was french, apparently upper crust, but she like to spend her time with people like Casper, who were part of what we’d now call the emerging Middle Class.

She’d been kind and interested in Casper, who was curious and eager to learn about places far from his own. She was very interested in Casper’s life too, which he found flattering and strange. It all seemed pretty boring to him, taking notes and amending contracts. Antoinette was rapt, though, and she kept paying for more and more beer. Casper said he remembered thinking it should have been ringing alarm bells for him, that he should have heard the purr in her voice as a warning, if only because of his wife and children at home. People in the bar were giving them strange looks. But he couldn’t seem to resist it, the conversation was good, and there was something about Antoinette that kept him talking even though he knew that really he shouldn’t have.

When the bar closed, they walked out arm in arm. Casper offered to walk her home; the sun would be rising soon but it wasn’t right to leave a woman alone in the city without an escort. People were going to talk whether he did this propriety or not, and he didn’t want to part from her. She was staying in the finest hotel in the city, but as they approached the grand steps, she stopped. She told him there was another entrance, more discreet.

Casper thought he knew what as being asked of him, then. That she was going to sneak him up to her room. He was going to cheat on his wife. He stood, conflicted, but when he said he should just go home, she wouldn’t let him unwind their arms. What happened next happened so fast and he was so drunk that it only registered in his memory as a series of still moments which he could not string together coherently in his mind.

They were on the street, by the stairs. She was kissing him. He couldn’t pull away. He was flung against a wall so hard all the air rushed out of his lungs. She was taking off his shirt. He was inside a building with the windows boarded shut. Her teeth were in his skin. His head was spinning, he couldn’t stand up on his own. She was dragging him by his ankles. He was naked, she was biting his thigh. Every muscle in his body was shaking. She was kissing him. He couldn’t breathe. He was on the floor in the dark. Everything was pain. He tasted something rich and sweet. He drank it without question. As he drank, a feeling bloomed outwards from the centre of his chest, like the petals of a flower unfurling, but the more that unfurled, the stranger it felt, and each petal was hot as a branding iron, and everything was pain.

He was gagged, naked, shivering. He was cold but the inside of him was scalding hot.

The next thing he remembered was he was on top of her, and her finger was in his mouth.

He wasn’t looking at me whilst he said all of this. His back was to me. He spoke with such an even tone, like he was talking about a trip to the beach or something.

‘I had been expecting a promotion,’ he said. ‘And I’m not certain, but I think my wife was expecting another child.’

‘Did you ever see her again?’

‘No. Never.’

He lay down on the floor with his eyes closed. I lay down next to him.

‘I’m so sorry that happened to you,’ I said.

It was quiet for a long time. I could feel him shaking slightly next to me. It didn’t occur to me for a few minutes that he was crying.

I sat up and over him. He had his hands over his face, so I slipped one of mine between his wrists to slip around his neck. Slowly, he turned over, until his face was in my lap instead of his hands. I combed my fingers through his hair, long and slightly damp. I teased the knots apart until his shoulders stopped shaking. He rolled over and looked up at me, his eyes such a rich, warm brown, not a swirl of red in sight. He seemed small, there, lying under me. He let me trace his lips, his nose, dust my finger lightly across the slight shadows around his eyes, the delicate thin skin of his eyelids. It was hard to remember that this was a predator. I wondered if I’d gone completely mad. I wondered if crying caused the blood debt he’d spoken about, too.

He watched in silence as I knelt in front of him.

‘Let me bite you,’ I said.

I traced his jaw as he’d traced mine so many times before, found the point in his neck where there should have been a pulse, but there wasn’t. I tasted his skin and bit down as hard as I could. Casper gasped, then chuckled. I closed my eyes, feeling tears on my cheeks. When I let go, there was the pattern of my teeth on his skin, a flush of angry red around it, but it wasn’t broken. I hadn’t made him bleed.

‘Did that hurt?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

I pressed the bruise and he hissed, eyes narrowing.

I covered my face with my hands. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

‘Do you want me to go?’ Casper asked.

‘Bite me,’ I whispered into his skin.

The change in him was instantaneous. He moved swift, eyes darting between each of mine, assessing, cautious. I said it again.

He did. It was rapturous. It always was.

When he kissed me I could taste my own blood on his lips. ‘I won’t kill you,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Bite me again.’

For it to work, to even have a shot at making a real vampire, you need your victim to be not quite dead, and then drink a huge volume of a vampire’s blood. A litre, or there about. The most controlled way to bring a human to that point, Cas says, is to drain them. That’s where the majority of mistakes happen. The vampire goes too far; the human is too weak to drink the blood which is given to them, or they’re dead before it touches their lips. Then, the right amount of blood can be given. If the vampire doesn’t come to this situation with their blood debt managed and their drive entirely sated, they can easily tip themselves into a frenzy when their give their human their blood and accidentally kill them out of instinct to replenish themselves.

Then you just wait, wait as the blood courses through the human’s body and listen for their heart to stop, and when it does, you wait longer, hours, hours, until the body is completely cold. Then, and only then, the vampire needs to give just another drop of blood, from the tip of their finger. They place it in the person’s mouth, and instinct should make them taste it.

Of course, that doesn’t always happen. Most of the time the person does not wake. And then, of course, there’s a chance they’ll wake rabid and senseless. But, if all these infinitesimally small odds are in your favour, you wake up, hungry for blood. Not dead, not alive, but a third thing. In between. A vampire.

I– I think there’s a way I can make it work, even if he doesn’t come back. I think. If I just. Hold back a syringe full of what Casper left me, and I put it in my mouth once I’ve drunk the rest, it should work the same. The drive only wakes up once the body has cooled, the instinct won’t be triggered until the proper time, even though the syringe is there from the off.

But I need to make sure it actually stays there, in my mouth. Doesn’t fall aside. A- and I don’t drink it by mistake in the process of the blood taking the last bit of my life out of me. Casper warned there might be some… thrashing.

ALFIE SIGHS

It’s not ideal. But. I.

The alternative is dying without any hope it wouldn’t be permanent.

It would be easier if he was here. Maybe if I waited it out, measured that last litre into two doses instead of drinking it all at once. Maybe he’d be back before my time ran out and we could have the best chance of it working, but the thing is I know he would be here if something hadn’t happened.

‘Cause he wouldn’t leave me like this, he can’t. Not when he knows I’m scared. Not when he knows I’m so close… to the end. He doesn’t have a choice any more than I had a choice.

I’m going to measure out the blood. Maybe if I drink it bit by bit rather than all at once… I can string out this final dose… before… I have to make my decision.

I don’t know that it’ll work.

[END]

EIRA: Not Quite Dead is written, performed, and edited by Eira Major, under a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution License. Live, laugh, bite.