Scream
By: Alexis Yang
Tags: Short Story, Relationships, Fiction, Love, Healing

Short story

Scream

He ate her up like a black hole.

Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash

Candace never thought she’d lunge at her former lover slathered in fake blood, but that’s what she found herself doing on Halloween night shortly after her twenty-fifth birthday.

She had taken up one-time gig at the haunted house in town, and it hadn’t been thirty minutes into the night when she found herself hissing at the screaming face of Andrew Li.

Two years prior, Candace would have paid to see the priceless terror on Andrew’s face. Now she gasped and stepped back as the crowd pushed Andrew forward, ushering him along to the next scare. Candace turned and watched as he receded; he hadn’t recognized her.

There was a woman at his elbow with blonde hair — silky, long, well-kept. Candace swept a hand through her stringy, straight, bleach-blond bob and felt her stomach churn.

When she was still with Andrew, she used to dye her hair any color possible in attempt to subdue its horrid nature. Andrew, who kept his jet-black hair short and neatly parted in the front, didn’t understand why she changed her hairdo so often. He didn’t understand why she altered things constantly — her appearance, her apartment, her lingo — but she knew clearly that if she wasn’t interesting enough, eclectic enough, different enough, Andrew would not love her anymore.

Candace must have fallen short, because now she watched the blonde woman’s head until it disappeared into the crowd. This whole setup seemed awfully sickly to her now — the stifling getup, the dollar-store vampire fangs, the thought of lunging at Andrew Li with angry, demeaning streaks of fake blood slapped onto her face. Still, she stuck it out until the night was over, because she needed the pay.

That was what sickened her the most — that Andrew paid to come here for pleasure, Andrew in his business suits, Andrew who ran a green energy startup, Andrew who now had a prettier blonde as a lover.

And then there was Candace rooming in an apartment, spending her days serving upper-class people in an upper-class restaurant, living with a friendly enough guy and still eating canned soup at twenty-five.

The instant the haunted house closed for the night, Candace ripped out her vampire teeth and sought out her roommate, Ethan. He was dressed in similar garb, his teeth still in as he lunged at her, fangs bared. “Stop right there or I’ll drink your blood,” he growled.

“No thanks,” she replied, pushing him away. “Hey, let’s go.”

He peered at her and asked around the fangs, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just hungry. Let’s go.”

Ethan had an uncanny ability to read her, unlike Andrew, who never could. As Ethan shrugged and pulled out his fangs, Candace glanced around, scanning the dispersing crowd for Andrew and his new lover. They were nowhere to be found.

“Why so jittery?” Ethan asked, leading the way as they weaved through the crowd to the exit.

“I’m just hungry.”

“You get jittery when you’re hungry?” Ethan asked, studying her face with his almond-brown eyes as they stepped out onto the street. The air was chilly and the sky was dark, pitch-black, like a black hole. Candace closed her eyes and felt like it was pulling her in.

When she opened her eyes, Ethan took her elbow and led her down the street. “Come on. Let’s get you something to eat.”

Candace yanked her arm away from him. So soon after seeing Andrew, Ethan’s touch felt like his. “Don’t touch me.”

“Okay, geez.” Ethan’s face looked spooky at night, though she knew that it was only Ethan.

Behind that fake blood, his skin was the color of coffee. Youthfully smooth, like he was still in college. He had long, dark eyelashes, and even with all that makeup, she saw them in the light of the street lamps.

“Hey, I’m gonna try something,” he suggested. “You just watch.”

She nodded and tried to stick her hands in her pockets, but the damned vampire costume didn’t have any. Candace often walked with her head down and her hands jammed in her pockets — of course not at work, because that restaurant required waitresses to be alert and attentive and pleasant — but usually she’d walk with her knuckles pressing against the fabric of her bomber jacket pockets, glancing up every so often to see where she was going. From a distance, it looked like she was afraid of the world. She contemplated this habit as she watched Ethan race up the steps of someone’s front porch.

“Hey,” she called. “Ethan, what are you doing?”

Ethan grinned at her and spread his arms out wide. “What does it look like?”

He rang the doorbell and Candace stood on the street, shaking her head and smiling at him. “Trick or treat,” he said to the old woman who answered the door, and soon he came down the steps with a chocolate candy bar.

“Here you go,” he said, holding out the candy bar to her. “Enjoy.”

“You’re ridiculous,” she replied, taking it. “Thank you.”

“Of course.”

They walked in silence for a bit, Candace savoring the milk chocolate, remembering how much she used to love candy. When she was dating Andrew, she’d stopped eating it. He said it made her gain too much weight.

That made Candace think of him again and want him to be there when she walked up the steps to her apartment, just sitting in the living room, waiting. No matter how many times she resolved not to have these sorts of fantasies anymore, she had them nonetheless. She and Andrew were done. But the sight of him at the haunted house shook her so badly that she felt like she was falling apart inside.

“Do you like the way I walk?” Candace asked Ethan suddenly.

“How do you walk?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know. You notice everything.”

“What, like you’re a moody teenager?” Ethan joked. “Yeah, I like it. It makes you look distinctive.”

“I don’t want to look distinctive,” Candace replied, feeling as if she was looking at herself from the outside, watching a slouching young woman with blood streaked on her face and a hideous black costume drag herself down the street. “I don’t want to look alert or attentive or pleasant.”

“What do you want to look like?”

She stared out at the street, which was filled with people returning home from the haunted house and a few straggling trick-or-treaters streaking across the road. Still, it felt so empty. “I don’t know. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

Suddenly, she found herself sitting down on the curb. In front of her, there was a puddle with a candy wrapper floating in it. Ethan lowered himself down next to her, just another vampire.

“Hey,” he said, “I think you’re pretty great.”

“Yeah, sure.” She wiped at her nose with the back of her hand and turned her head away from him. There was a family getting into a car, a family just like Andrew would have one day.

“I don’t even know what belongs to me anymore,” she admitted.

“What do you mean?”

“Andrew. I saw Andrew at the haunted house. I lunged at him with those idiotic fangs. It just became a habit, the way I walk and how I don’t eat candy anymore and how I spend so much time wondering what I’m going to do with my hair, to the point where I can hardly remember what I was like before him. Everything still belongs to him. He wanted everything, Ethan. He didn’t only want my time or my love, but he wanted my entire being, my heart, my soul, my everything, and I gave it to him. I gave it all to him.”

Ethan was quiet for a long time. Candace kept her face away from his, but then she felt his hand touch her arm.

Candace imagined what Andrew would say if he saw her like this, sitting on a curb on Halloween night with another vampire. At the end of their relationship, he would’ve said it suited her, because she didn’t come from money and he did. Because her hair was always too stringy and didn’t curl right. Because her skin was too milky white, and she wouldn’t tan. Because she pulled on a crisp white shirt and a pair of black trousers and a gray vest to work at the restaurant every day and didn’t wear party dresses like how he wanted her to. Because he ate her up like a black hole, wanting more and more until she mutated into an unrecognizable being, just a shadow of who she used to be.

“Do you still love him?” Ethan asked quietly.

“Yes, I still love him,” she choked out, turning to Ethan, who was looking at her with his beautiful long eyelashes.

She wished she could kiss Ethan or at least hold his hand, but then there was Andrew with his stern whisper telling her that she better not leave him, mumbling to her that she must never leave him and he must never leave her, always whispering or mumbling because he never yelled, never, never. He was too proper to yell. She had never heard him scream until tonight, when he looked at her face and the first thing that came to his mind was terror.

“I can’t stop loving him,” she continued, “even though I have to stop. Ethan, I think I just fascinated him.”

The night sky pulsed above them. Ethan wrapped his arm around Candace’s shoulders and Candace shuddered violently.

Andrew’s screaming face kept coming back to her, and she knew that she would hear that scream when she fell asleep at night, the scream that gave him a euphoric rush and the scream that gave her a few dollar bills, the scream that was just a passing blip to him and an eternity to her. That scream should have meant nothing but the fleeting brush of a stranger, a vague memory that fades within a day. Maybe that was what Candace was like to Andrew — just a blip, a fleeting brush, a fading memory.

“It’ll be okay, Candace,” Ethan said. “You’ll be okay.”

“Sure,” she answered, flicking the candy wrapper into the puddle, where it floated along with its companion. Then she turned and kissed Ethan right on the lips, long enough to try to forget Andrew, long enough to realize that Ethan was not like Andrew at all — that Andrew was not even like a human.

She tore away from her bewildered roommate and raced down the street, her shoes pounding on the asphalt and her long black cloak flying behind her, the nighttime air whistling in her ears as she realized that Andrew was the one who drank her blood until she was dry.

She and Ethan were just vampires in masquerade, but Andrew was the authentic version, the one she should have screamed at in the haunted house.

Candace heard Ethan chasing after her. Her heart was pounding, but she didn’t stop running. In her apartment, she would peel off the costume and wash the blood from her face and see herself in the mirror.

For the first time in years, she would possess just a scrap of life, a fraction of Candace that she could call her own. And for that night, that was enough.