Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“Well, maybe it’s this crop. Those Alberti boys haven’t been fertilizing properly, maybe the primofiore will turn out better.”

Magreb fixes me with one fish-bright eye. “Clyde, I think it’s time for us to go.”

Wind blows the leaves apart. Lemons wink like a firmament of yellow stars, slowly ripening, and I can see the other, truer night behind them.

“Go where?” Our marriage, as I conceive it, is a commitment to starve together.

“We’ve been resting here for decades. I think it’s time … what is that thing?”

I have been preparing a present for Magreb, for our anniversary, a “cave” of scavenged materials — newspaper and bottle glass and wooden beams from the lemon tree supports — so that she can sleep down here with me. I’ve smashed dozens of bottles of fruity beer to make stalactites. Looking at it now, though, I see the cave is very small. It looks like an umbrella mauled by a dog.

“That thing?” I say. “That’s nothing. I think it’s part of the hot dog machine.”

“Jesus. Did it catch on fire?”

“Yes. The girl threw it out yesterday.”

“Clyde.” Magreb shakes her head. “We never meant to stay here forever, did we? That was never the plan.”

“I didn’t know we had a plan,” I snap. “What if we’ve outlived our food supply? What if there’s nothing left for us to find?”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“Why can’t you just be grateful? Why can’t you be happy and admit defeat? Look at what we’ve found here!” I grab a lemon and wave it in her face.

“Good night, Clyde.”

I watch my wife fly up into the watery dawn, and again I feel the awful tension. In the flats of my feet, in my knobbed spine. Love has infected me with a muscular superstition that one body can do the work of another.

I consider taking the funicular, the ultimate degradation — worse than the dominoes, worse than an eternity of sucking cut lemons. All day I watch the cars ascend, and I’m reminded of those American fools who accompany their wives to the beach but refuse to wear bathing suits. I’ve seen them by the harbor, sulking in their trousers, panting through menthol cigarettes and pacing the dock while the women sea-bathe. They pretend they don’t mind when sweat darkens the armpits of their suits. When their wives swim out and leave them. When their wives are just a splash in the distance.

Tickets for the funicular are twenty lire. I sit at the bench and count as the cars go by.

THAT EVENING, I take Magreb on a date. I haven’t left the lemon grove in upward of two years, and blood roars in my ears as I stand and clutch at her like an old man. We’re going to the Thursday night show at an antique theater in a castle in the center of town. I want her to see that I’m happy to travel with her, so long as our destination is within walking distance.

A teenage usher in a vintage red jacket with puffed sleeves escorts us to our seats, his biceps manacled in clouds, threads loosening from the badge on his chest. I am jealous of the name there: GUGLIELMO.

The movie’s title is already scrolling across the black screen: SOMETHING CLANDESTINE IS HAPPENING IN THE CORN!

Magreb snorts. “That’s a pretty lousy name for a horror movie. It sounds like a student film.”

“Here’s your ticket,” I say. “I didn’t make the title up.”

It’s a vampire movie set in the Dust Bowl. Magreb expects a comedy, but the Dracula actor fills me with the sadness of an old photo album. An Okie has unwittingly fallen in love with the monster, whom she’s mistaken for a rich European creditor eager to pay off the mortgage on her family’s farm.

“That Okie,” says Magreb, “is an idiot.”

I turn my head miserably and there’s Fila, sitting two rows in front of us with a greasy young man. Benny Alberti. Her white neck is bent to the left, Benny’s lips affixed to it as she impassively sips a soda.

“Poor thing,” Magreb whispers, indicating the pigtailed actress. “She thinks he’s going to save her.”

Dracula shows his fangs, and the Okie flees through a cornfield. Cornstalks smack her face. “Help!” she screams to a sky full of crows. “He’s not actually from Europe!”

There is no music, only the girl’s breath and the fwap-fwap-fwap of the off-screen fan blades. Dracula’s mouth hangs wide as a sewer grate. His cape is curiously still.

The movie picture is frozen. The fwap ping is emanating from the projection booth; it rises to a grinding r-r-r , followed by lyrical Italian cussing and silence and finally a tidal sigh. Magreb shifts in her seat.

“Let’s wait,” I say, seized with empathy for these two still figures on the screen, mutely pleading for repair. “They’ll fix it.”

People begin to file out of the theater, first in twos and threes and then in droves. “I’m tired, Clyde.”

“Don’t you want to know what happens?” My voice is more frantic than I intend.

“I already know what happens.”

“Don’t you leave now, Magreb. I’m telling you, they’re going to fix it. If you leave now, that’s it for us, I’ll never …”

Her voice is beautiful, like gravel underfoot: “I’m going to the caves.”

I’M ALONE in the theater. When I turn to exit, the picture is still frozen, the Okie’s blue dress floating over windless corn, Dracula’s mouth a hole in his white greasepaint.

Outside I see Fila standing in a clot of her friends, lit by the marquee. These kids wear too much makeup and clothes that move like colored oils. They all look rained on. I scowl at them and they scowl back, and then Fila crosses to me.

“Hey, you,” she says, grinning, breathless, so very close to my face. “Are you stalking somebody?”

My throat tightens.

“Guys!” Her eyes gleam. “Guys, come over and meet the vampire .”

But the kids are gone.

“Well! Some friends,” she says, then winks. “Leaving me alone, defenseless …”

“You want the old vampire to bite you, eh?” I hiss. “You want a story for your friends?”

Fila laughs. Her horror is a round, genuine thing, bouncing in both her black eyes. She smells like hard water and glycerin. The hum of her young life all around me makes it difficult to think. A bat filters my thoughts, opens its trembling lampshade wings.

Magreb . She’ll want to hear about this. How ridiculous, at my age, to find myself down this alley with a young girl: Fila powdering her neck, doing her hair up with little temptress pins, yanking me behind this Dumpster. “Can you imagine”—Magreb will laugh—“a teenager goading you to attack her! You’re still a menace, Clyde.”

I stare vacantly at a pale mole above the girl’s collarbone. Magreb , I think again, and I smile, and the smile feels like a muzzle stretched taut against my teeth. It seems my hand has tightened on the girl’s wrist, and I realize with surprise, as if from a great distance, that she is twisting away.

“Hey, nonno , come on now, what are you—”

THE GIRL’S HEAD lolls against my shoulder like a sleepy child’s, then swings forward in a rag-doll circle. The starlight is white mercury compared to her blotted-out eyes. There’s a dark stain on my periwinkle shirt, and one suspender has snapped. I sit Fila’s body against the alley wall, watch it dim and stiffen. Spidery graffiti weaves over the brick behind her, and I scan for some answer contained there: GIOVANNA & FABIANO. VAFFANCULO! VAI IN CULO.

A scabby-furred creature, our only witness, arches its orange back against the Dumpster. If not for the lock I would ease the girl inside. I would climb in with her and let the red stench fill my nostrils, let the flies crawl into the red corners of my eyes. I am a monster again.