Big Dipper

Bankston Creech

I met my first girlfriend in the graveyard. She was a ghost. It’s all very romantic. Very tragic. Maybe a little cliché.

 I was so taken from the first moment she looked at me with those green, starving eyes I didn’t even think to ask the obvious questions. She flinched away every time I reached for her hand on those long walks down the cracked sidewalk, but in the next second she said I was beautiful,  and laughed softly, kindly, like she meant it. I got too lost in that laugh to care about the little things. We didn’t need to touch, as long as she kept looking at me like that and instead of being just Kat I could be her kitty.

Madeline was all wrong from the beginning and I didn’t give a shit because as long as I could hope she loved me everything was okay. Even if it was an anemic love, the kind of love that makes your stomach flutter and you say it’s from butterflies but you know it’s really because you’re never quite full. I starved on her for weeks. It wasn’t long before she started bleeding into the rest of my life. The first time I took a bite of cornbread and all I could taste was metal and wet I knew for certain the only way I’d ever be satisfied was if I sated her hunger.

That night I lay myself down under our favorite tree, Spanish moss hanging low enough to brush against me when the wind blew, and I asked for a little time to stargaze before she took me. She told me the history of every constellation we saw, wove myths expertly, told ancient stories like they’d just come to her on the fly. I repeated what I remembered from my fourth grade astronomy unit.

“All I know’s the Big Dipper. When I was a kid I thought the moon must drink out of there. During her break time and all.”

Madeline's lips brushed my cheek, tongue licking at the soft flesh there. She was mist and the skin stung raw when she pulled away. I reached for her, fully expecting my hand to claw through the air, but instead I was cradling a pink cheek that I swore had been bloodless white before. I wanted to taste the sweet new redness on Maddie’s lips. So I did.

“It does seem to be quite big. She’d have to be very thirsty to get through even a portion of it.”

I didn’t notice the blood start to drip from the cracks in my lips. Not when Maddie smiled against me. Not when Maddie parted her own lips to slip in her tongue. Slithering herself into me, twisting us together in a knot and pulling. I got too full fast, red gushing out of my throat to join the blood starting to leak from my lips. They were barely there anymore, my mouth nothing but an open wound. Nothing to stop Maddie’s tongue from lapping blood from my gums. Maddie’s fingertips brushed against the pulse point in my neck and when I reached up I felt her heart beating for the first time. I knew her hand was going lower. Sometimes I could even feel her, nails sharp and skin tacky with blood, in the second before she peeled off another inch of skin. For the first time in weeks I was full with the knowledge that she could finally feed.

“Something as big, as beautiful as the moon? I can’t imagine she’s ever really satisfied.”