1) The Temptation to “Stalk” Exes: This was my delusion. I figured, we were going on this dark journey together. If we could be this committed, I’d stop waking up in the middle of the night to see you scrolling through her Instagram.
Well, I don’t wake up in the middle of the night anymore. I wake at dusk. That’s one change.
The “stalking” is no longer a cheeky turn of phrase. Now, when you think of her (“them,” I should say, there have been at least five “hers” over the years), you telepathically summon her to our lair. She can’t get the image of your pale, eternally young face out of her head. “But how?” I hear her thinking, “He and his wife have been dead for years!”
Sometimes her husband and her children follow her, disturbed by this new habit of “sleepwalking.” I hear each of their delicious hearts throbbing through the floorboards. That fear-scent in the children is particularly tasty.
I obeyed you for a decade as you bade me not to feed on them, your exes, their living breathing families. But you kept summoning those same half-dozen women to our farmhouse, which was supposed to appear abandoned. People were getting suspicious. So I picked them off, one by one. I ate the flesh of those women you loved before me, who were still alive after I was dead.
It’s not my fault some people are inept at clearing their browser history.
2) Body Issues: We were in our late 30s and not getting any younger. I remember our excitement at the idea of crow’s feet smoothing out and cellulite firming up. We’d willingly go a few shades paler, we said, because we were promised complexions like milk.
Milk we got. But nothing improved, not really, we just became more intense versions of ourselves.
All this after you begged for an extra month as a mortal so you could crash-diet. Or, what you called “run more.”
The supernatural stakes didn’t change your routine. I see now that nothing could. I packed all those Paleo, macro-biotic, grain-free lunches you read about. You threw them out at work then spent your lunch breaks at McDonalds. (I never minded what you ate, for the record.)
Our last month of life passed. You looked the same by the end. And now you’ll never look any different.
3) Food Issues: In life, even in our marital home, we were never allowed to use the phrase “eating disorder.” This is because you were born male, grew into a man. Those concepts are so far away from us now, they’re laughable.
We have no living cells, so we carry no chromosomes. We release neither testosterone nor estrogen. We cannot copulate. Who cares what words suit us now? “Monster” is blessedly gender-neutral.
While you lived you had a mother who would grip your stomach and arm “rolls” to mock you. You had a sister who would shove years-old pictures under your nose, of your body, from when you were “thinner.” (You always looked sexy to me. I never stopped desiring you, till the night we died. Wanting you used to remind me I was alive.)
You binged on ice cream to spite them. You gave up dairy to impress them. You begged them to speak more kindly to you. They refused. The cycle started again.
So you chose to stop your own heart, make your body dead, lose your soul. But what do we do now but binge and purge on blood of the living? We feed and feel guilty. We hunger and feel dread.
What are vampires but immortal bulimics?
4) Low Sex Drive: You told me we’d had a great run—10 years of steady sex and mutual attraction. But your libido, you were certain, was in rapid decline. That losing the ability to have sex was nothing that concerned you. (I meant to suggest one more time that you earnestly try to give up Reddit and all porn for a month, see if that had any impact. But I’d already conjured a demon for you. The time for constructive criticism was over.)
Well, what we were promised was delivered. Dead organs transmit no sensation. No blood, no engorgement.
Yet, mortals intrigue you now more than ever. Now only daylight can stop you from watching porn. You love nothing more than to observe the living twisting in pain and delight, pushing their breakable bodies to their limits.
I know that we can only become more ourselves as the eons pass. I know this must have always been inside you—you’d prefer to watch than to participate. Being undead suits you.
5) Depression: We got drunk on red wine on our last night as mortals. Toasted our brilliant alternative to counseling. We’d rather lose all our blood than try to find an in-network couple’s therapist.
The jokes were never funny. What’s more depressing than being dead?
We heard our families eulogize us from the church rafters, but they didn’t get any of the stories right. They muddled all the details, didn’t capture our true essences.
They memorialized people we’d never been, and then we watched them cope and heal and have great lives without us.
All our friends, family and coworkers needed to believe us dead. So now we have only each other, for time without end.
That is my very definition of “depressing.”
originally published in The Vignette Review
Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She’s the managing editor at Newfound Journal.
