My mouth tastes like chemicals, like how a Spirit Halloween smells. The cheap coffin packaging comes with a little powder you have to mix to affix the hollows of the plastic to your normal canine teeth. The costume fangs– $12.99– keep clicking when I talk.
God knows we’re not drunk enough as I wanted to be this Halloween, but I’ve never even been buzzed anyways. I heard a year later that you picked up substance problems– with the police situation, the news, to us, was just another piece of leverage. I felt guilty about reporting it, but my friends never did– it’s messed up, and his family– also don’t we really hate the cops????– then them, he deserves worse he’ll get off easy let that fucker rot.
I used to think that love was a kind of violence. I thought that was how it was supposed to be. Because tonight I’m hooked on you like a knife caught in my throat.
I grew up under covers in my older sister’s bed, peeking at trash teen dramas on the TV. I grew up on lessons from my father, knowing love as another kind of wound to bandage, taught myself to throw a punch, to not cry when my brother swung: to be cool girl in middle school was to be unbothered, which was to be sexy, mature, which was to mean also: tough. Don’t cry when they snap your bra strap, sweetheart, courting is ritual like hunting knife and virgin strapped at the altar: this is something that happens to you. You are a vessel sacrifice to be captured (sexily) or rescued (daintily. But also, sexily). You’re hands on a body. You’re their hands, on your body. So at sixteen I knew what every teenage girl should want: to be the love interest, which means: to be wanted; which meant, to be hunted. Rule #1 straight from the Pilot episode of The Vampire Diaries.
You kick your feet up when you get back from the bathroom, and I press play again on the slasher flick. I’ve spat out my plastic fangs into my bathroom sink. I’m sixteen, I’m cliché, I’m a little obsessed with your canine teeth.
Let me apologize for something. I’ve been a bad host tonight, all focused on the narrative of I want. Not enough about you: a bad-boy with a tragic string of exes- you stole the line “tragic romantic” from me when I said it in earnest. Yeah, you’ve got a glint in your eye like a steel knife and you look impervious to anything but silver bullets– shaggy dark hair, mouth like the oldest star in a boy-band, long sharpened canine fangs like a real life monster.
That mouth buried the kid I used to know for good. Someone would say once to me, months later–
“Your friend died. That’s not him anymore.” So I still see you on campus like a specter, sometimes laughing, puppeting around my ex-friend’s corpse.
But now it’s Halloween 2022, and I am sixteen, and very, very carefully, I lean into you. My head lowers onto your shoulder, body curled up against your chest, and my heart is swelling with a polished triumph.
Right now you haven’t done it yet. Right now I haven’t experienced heartbreak, haven’t written a 2,000 word witness statement, or kissed the concrete, nails bitten and bleeding. Right now, I’m picturing hickies, not bruises. I still think if you drew blood it’d be pretty.
It’s easy for you to be honest. It was even easier for you to be sick. We all tried to kill that part of you, we really did, but you need help that we couldn’t give you. Meds. A therapist. An exorcist. The day before you did it, you walked out into the night. You claimed you were seeing stuff that wasn’t there. But in the end there was just you, who ripped a heart out of a chest with your bare hands and said it’d be too violent with a kitchen knife. You knew she didn’t want it. Hands on a body, you said– no hallucinations to pin it on: I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway.
In the future, I will hope it haunts you. I will hope you regret it all the time. I will hope one day you’ll come back bleeding out and begging for help, just so I can say no, but I still won’t know if you think of me and that’s the scariest thing of all. Isn’t that still a form of hypnosis, me helpless and sick and searching for signs to justify your power over me?
My imitation fangs would only ever kiss the crossfire. You’re careless, I know I shouldn’t love you, I know the ones that stay alive are smarter than that, but I hold out that hope in the back of my mind– sue me, but save off the staking me till that first heartbreak. It’s October, and I’m clueless, and you were still alive, and I felt my blood hot and heady under a witching moon. It’s October, and this will backfire on the both of us, and you’ll only know it when you bite the bullet; by May, I’ve made it out that door and I am never, ever coming back.
It’s the witching hour, and we’re alive, but not for much longer. I should’ve booked it when the door first creaked in the slasher. I should’ve known it was true at the first warning, the whisper: “He only knows how to kiss with his canine teeth.”
You stole my line, you terrible poet, you stupid, asshole Raven, repeating a mockery of “tragic romantic” at my chamber door. You think you’re special just because you like your girls better bleeding. It’s October, and I’ve only been warned once before, but that makes us all the more excited.
I guess I always would die first in a horror movie.
Campbell Brown is a queer, Hapa writer from Arizona. She is a co-EIC of Bus Talk Lit, and has work in The Empty Inkwell, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Major 7th Mag, among other publications. She likes homeric epithets, Oxford commas, semicolons, and em-dashes; she hates self-writing these bios because she’s scared of sounding pretentious instead of quirky and cool and oh god please help. Find her on Instagram at @p0cketwatch3s and on Twitter at @cambrownwrites.
