Umpiir, Demp Femme

I could almost taste her desperation,
it was coming off her in droves,
lending to the air a coppery predilection
like battery acid and perfume.
I couldn’t help but swoon a little.
She’d been out here for at least a week,
with nothing to fulfill her but strays.
There we no real communities around here after all
and that meant no constant food source.
Something grew rapidly in my peripheral vision
and for an instant I saw bony hands,
hooked into claws.
the air swathed around me,
thick with her ancient scent,
but that parted as her fingertips
cut the space between us.
I dodged, but barely
and then the scent was of rotten dirt
and mold. She was gone again.

I guess you could say it was attempted rape.
Those sharp, craggy claws attached
to her fingertips were nothing less
than coffin nails on my eternal soul.
(If I’d been just an inch or two closer)
I wouldn’t recover from that.
She would have raped me, taken me
in a way no other could
and I would have given in.
The minute the pain hits, the need arises.
I know.
She capered in and out of sight
beyond, behind, betwixt.
I whirled around with the ash stake
clutched tight in my grip, beading her,
attempting to, but it was as though
she were everywhere, a speck of dust now,
a ray of moonlight then, a sound and a flash.
God, but she was quicker than any of them.
Older too...maybe—
A bright spectrum of blood-red and gray light
burst into my head and I fell to the dusty,
barnyard floor. The stake was knocked from my hands.
That miasma of perfume and dirt
and mold and copper surrounded me again,
but the pain was no less than a supernova.

It felt like my head had been reshaped, somehow
and my vision was reduced to a gritty snowy-ash
filter, like the stark, grainy don’t-look-away-for God’s sake
footage they show on the 11 o’clock news.
She fastened on me and I gained an instant erection
as she straddled my hips, her fingers digging deep
in my chest as she sought to rip my shirt off.
I closed my eyes, the news clicked off
but the headlines still flashed there
in bright, angry red—END.

I heard the soft purr of my shirt ripped away
at the seams, my chest exposed.
It was over.

.....

From out the shadows of my shut eyelids,
I heard what sounded like a tea kettle screaming
for relief, a high keening sound and then
the struggle of her tongue, attempting an actual
blood-cry. She couldn’t.
The cross on my chest felt like it had gained
a few hundred pounds. It was lead-weight,
but I felt as though I was connected with it.
Infused. I had almost forgotten it was there.
The darkness was beginning to grow lighter,
but my eyelids were still tightly shut.
If I’d opened my eyes I’d have caught hell,
so I clamped them tighter, the shaded glare–
growing brighter, my head–a swampy marsh of anguish,
the tea-kettle shriek now an air-raid siren.
How could her throat make such a sound?!

Then, all at once, the sound cut off in a loud gulp.
“You will bleed out fresh!”
I felt sudden relief as the crushing weight on my hips
lifted off me, accompanied by a warm, insanely alive
gust of air and then also, the weight of the cross
was dulling...diminishing...gone.
I opened my eyes.
Through the barnyard loft window, a fat, yellow moon,
caked with curdled spots of brown shone in across
the clouds, and silhouetted there, the shape
of the last on my list, in flight towards the Western March.
I heard her shrieking laughter out there over the twilit moors.
A horse brayed out somewhere, followed by another.
My own was right outside the barn doors,
neighing anxiously. It’s hooves knocked on the door,
as if waiting for my response.
I checked my head. The area around the temples
seemed softer, malleable. My nose was bleeding,
but I was still alive. That was something, wasn’t it?
I touched the cross, then my shrinking erection,
feeling a dull warmth in both.
I smiled.
I knew I’d have to hunt her again though.
She was the last after all, and she had their power.
She had most of it now, in fact.
But right then, I really needed a fucking lager.