Lou 4 / 99.9

99.9 / Suzanne Vega













The suddenness of her physical form’s demise brought her forward again to waiver uncertainly over the pile of fine grey powder. That used to look like me. She marveled with


“New meaning to ‘over my dead body,’ isn’t it.” She thought the line should have amused her, but it didn’t.


She knew she had waited in the same spot for some time. She was acutely aware that the daylight came and went several rounds before she stirred. It wasn’t like dying before. There was no hunger, no pain. Nothing to indicate she was alive. Well, perhaps she’d contemplated alive was the wrong word, nothing to indicate she was present except her own precarious sense of being.


When she awoke a vampire she was present. She moved. She spoke. She felt. Granted she did not do those things in a normal human way and some of the sensations were exceedingly strange, but she had a sense of life as well as consciousness. She had a sense of the world outside herself, at least up until the moment the sun set. Then a heavy, deep sound sleep fell upon her.


Now, I am nothing, she thought. It was anticlimactic.