The Shake

lucky not to be hurt, he’d have a real roller coaster ride and a good story to tell, and I would let him live to tell his tale. Those who weren’t so lucky were my supper.
In one respect, it was a game of random selection. I had no control over who might drive by on any given night. But it really wasn’t random. I was still deciding which of the many passing cars I would step in front of. I even managed to rationalize this. I told myself that, by people’s own standards, a full and successful life was best measured by one’s possessions. People with all the expensive toys had already enjoyed their fair share of life. So I’d let the ten-year-old pickups and economy sedans pass, telling myself it was more equitable to terminate the driver of a Mercedes or a BMW. This kind of pseudo-reasoning was completely unconvincing, but with my need for blood and no way to make an objective choice of who to kill, I was reduced to this kind of weak-minded rationalization. Like people, I was usually ready to abandon my critical faculties whenever they failed to serve my self-interest.
At any rate, between the staged suicides, the car accidents, and the lucky chance opportunities that occasionally presented themselves, I was able to feed on human blood at least three or four times a month. The rest of the time, drawing blood from horses and cattle provided an abundant supply of adequate nourishment to tide me over between real meals. This methodical moderation, this submission to a program of planned management, was an acceptable price to pay for a permanent residence. The stability, I told myself, made up for the lack of adventure. I would eventually get tired of it. Either that, or one of life’s little surprises would bring it all crashing down. But in the meantime...
In the living room, the TV was on, but the sound was turned all the way down. Like the night before, Francine was asleep on the sofa. She was lying on her left side, her back to the TV, with the same old blanket pulled up around her shoulders. I knelt beside her and listened to her breathing. There was a slight wheeze when she inhaled. When she exhaled, her breath smelled surprisingly fresh, as if the vitality of her body had resisted the decline of her spirit.
I lifted the blanket away from her shoulders. She was still dressed in her work clothes. The motion of the blanket released the scent of her body, unmasked by perfume. Even after a century separating me from my human past, certain sensations, particularly odors, still occasionally ambushed me, transporting me back to that other life. The sweat of this young woman’s body was momentarily transfixing. A hundred years ago, I would have been entranced by it. But those were only memories. However precise they might be, they were drained of emotional content, irrelevant to my current concerns.
Gently, I placed my left hand at the base of her neck, and with my right hand simultaneously pinched her nose closed and covered her mouth. There was a moment of sleepy resistance, then her eyes sprang open. When I turned her head, rolling her onto her back so she could more comfortably see me, her eyes flared even wider with panic. She tried to inhale, but only created a vacuum pulling against the palm of my hand.
People don’t always behave predictably in a situation like this. Some are fighters and will take the struggle to the bitter end. There was a time when I judged the fighters to be worthy of higher regard. They didn’t just give up after a brief, token struggle. I couldn’t understand someone who wouldn’t fight for their own life; who acted as if resisting death were no more than a formality that had to be gotten through, and the sooner the better. But I no longer felt that way. I knew from experience that fighting could be a form of acquiescence, and what might first appear as passivity could in reality be the most stubborn resistance, a desperate tactic driven by a fierce determination to prevail. The latter was fairly common among women. Smaller and physically weaker, women have had to find more subtle ways to turn the tide in their favor.
Francine, however, neither fought nor feigned. I wondered if her passivity was a symptom of her depression. Maybe she had already thrown in her cards and was glad to let unconsciousness insulate her from the only thing she now expected from life: more pain. Whatever the reason, she fainted straightaway. When her body went slack, I removed my hand from her face. She inhaled once quickly, then her breathing steadied. I lifted the blanket and draped it over the back of the sofa, then picked her up and carried her into the master bedroom.
I laid her on the bed and undressed her. She had a lovely body. Her skin was very pale, almost white, with small breasts and small, pink nipples. There was a tattoo of a ladybug on a leaf on the left side of her abdomen, just above her pubic hair. An inch-long scar paralleled her left kneecap. Her feet were small, the toes slender and straight, as if they had never been tortured by stylish shoes. They smelled of sweat and leather.
I picked her up again and carried her into the bathroom, laying her gently in the tub. I expected her to wake up when her bare skin made contact with the cold porcelain, but she didn’t. I turned on the water, adjusting it to a comfortable warmth, and watched as the water line slowly edged its way up her torso. When the tub was about two thirds full, I shut off the faucets.
There was nothing left to do except finish what I had come for. Yet, I hesitated. It wasn’t the woman’s naked body that gave me pause, but my own lack of reaction