Facets of Fantasy: An Ugly City

The skyline of New York twinkled, each little light bursting like a supernova straight into his eyes. Distant cars roared and honked in his ears, the exhaust mingling with the smell of sex in his nostrils, drifting from the apartment right behind him – from his own skin. He closed his eyes. New York wouldn't go away. It never did.

Three apartments over, a man hit his wife. Six apartments over, someone dropped their cellphone in the toilet, and swore. Thirteen apartments over a woman was crying. In Brooklyn, a cop shot a kid.

She came up behind him, a hand on his back. A jolt went through him, as he made his blood course through his body again. He hadn't heard her. Too busy taking in New York.

Now she was there, and he turned towards her. Brown tangled hair around an asymmetrical face, with a mouth that seemed twisted into a perpetual sneer. Dry lips, goop in her eyes, remnants of mascara clinging to her lashes. He smelled her breath, and with it, her six last meals and the exact time she'd been sleeping. He smelled what had become of those meals. And, of course, he smelled her blood, just beneath her skin.

“Harper. Moping again?”

“I'm afraid so, Miss Lennox. New York is such an ugly city, full of ugly people.”

She read his mind. He turned away, but too late. She was hurt.

“Do I really look like that?”

“All humans do.”

They were silent. He was naked, aware of the cold winter wind playing over his body but seeing no reason to care. She was wrapped in a sheet, her feet bare and cold on the balcony.

“What the fuck's the point, then? Why sleep with a stinking bag of body fluids, when you could be banging the Queen?”

Harper laughed. “First of all, one doesn't 'bang' the Queen of Vampires. But you have a valid point.”

He turned around to face her. His pale chiseled face sank into an expression of utter melancholy, his deep eyes searching hers. Licking his dry lips with a dry tongue, dry, always dry except when he had fed, he began to speak:

“-in all my endless years, haunted, tormented by my undying state, I've walked the Earth, in search of true love, in search of-”

She burst out laughing. It exploded in his ears, shattering the sounds of New York and any illusion of a romantic, immortal vampire. Suddenly he was just a naked guy on a balcony, looking rather stupid in the chilly night. Harper Anderson smiled, not the cool, sexy smile of an undying predator – but the awkward smile of a man being laughed at by his girlfriend.

“And that's why. I'm, uh... going to put some trousers on. Fetch me a beer, would you? Anything but that American stuff. I swear it tastes exactly like piss.”