EVERY NIGHT I DREAM

I am a vampire, a stark and stoic man with dazzling green eyes and sharp pointed nails. I dream of running though the night, leaping from roof to roof under a pale moon. I crawl into people's homes and I watch them sleep. I grin, fang to fang, and I slip my fingers beneath their blankets as I peel them back to reveal flesh and silk. I drink from them without the elegance of those I've read, piercing the necks of my victims with such force that I leave their heads hanging to the side like the branches of a weeping willow.

I do not know these people that I kill in my dreams. Young or old, rich or poor, I eviscerate them mercilessly all the same. Some scream. Some miss the opportunity. Every night I fall asleep next to my partner and he does not know he is lying next to a monster. He does not know that once, I dreamt of pushing back the curtains in our bedroom window and standing over us. He does not know that I watched myself sleep for what felt like hours. He does not know how I took my time devouring myself whole, how I gorged upon my anxious womanhood and all the ways my mother raised me to be polite. As my partner has done every night in the real world, he slept through the whole ordeal without so much as a snortle. I--the vampire, the dream-- I curled up next to him in the puddle of what was left and listened to him breath. The threads of my perception had become so thin that when I awoke, I found I was still there, listening to him breath.

(Once, I read about a woman who became a wolf and hunted rabbits in the dark woods. I did not envy the viscera so much as I envied her strength, her autonomy, her fangs.)

(I wonder why it is I must dream of being a man before I dream of being free.)