Musings from Victoria Boynton
Who says it has to be Halloween to have a fun treat? When Berry Knotwell found the perfect wax teeth for her grandson at the Dollar Store, here’s what happened. The vampire grandmas love it that this grandchild’s curls have North Carolinians confused! Gender identity has never been so much fun!
Berry was on urge-alert again. She had already eaten one frozen whoopee pie and now took another out of her ice chest. It had freezer-burn. It made a soggy pile on her kitchen counter, so she put a plate under it. Maybe if she put the melted glop in a bowl, maybe then it would stop looking like a cow pie?
She tried and tried not to eat it. She was getting closer and closer to picking up a spoon. Her old urge latched onto her, more, more, faster, faster.
If only she could stop time–embalm the whoopee pie—devote the coming years to funeral school— to learning the ancient techniques and the latest technologies of preservation. She would gladly take out more loans. She already had a mountain of them. One more? What would it hurt? “Yes, I will pay,” she’d say when they asked her about her fiduciary history (her fingers crossed behind her back)—”I will pay, even unto death.”
Eating Electric, from Vampire Grandma
The vampire grandmas relished the baby lettuce salads with tender little beets, bits of soil still clinging to them. Ruth Leslie Wright glugged fresh-squeezed juice like an alcoholic; she sometimes flew to Florida and spent the day driving among citrus groves downing juice from blood oranges she picked herself, tucking the raw fruit into her press, the scarlet juice running into the glass. And they wanted raw, fertilized eggs, warm from the nest, a delicacy which they loved to suck.
They wanted a dose of electric food—food with the aura still glowing. They wanted to put the glowing food in their mouths and feel it with their tongues, caress it in their mouths before it went down, suck the juice from it so they could feel the light of life disappear down their lovely, white throats. Going, going, gone. Ruth Leslie Wright said, “We must have electric food.” No one argued.
Ruth Leslie Wright! She got everyone—human or vampire—to agree with her, eventually.