It’s always around this hour in the summer (when it’s still so warm out, but there’s that flicker in the light) that I can’t help but remember moments of speaking to men, men who blinked with round colorless eyes as I told them how I simply wished for more time. They’d laughed, and I’d had to explain––
the kind of time who doesn’t show her face much, not anymore, except perhaps to the very wealthy, or the very insane, or to the slinking creatures that warm their bodies on rocks in the heat, a lucky few fearful of nothing but the looming evening. Perhaps I could set up a metal folding chair in the endless lessness of some defunct industrial parking lot, on the hottest afternoon of the year, and sit there, not even particularly comfortable, but alone and uninterrupted with time, who had almost become a stranger. She would be thrilled I’d known the best place for us to catch up, where she would not feel like a currency, and I would gently dust her off, listen to her stories of all the characters she’d met, how their silly instances of mortal wanting had made her belly-laugh until she’d wept. I would have time to myself, for only-she-knows how long, burning and sweating and screaming our smiles at the asphalt oven of permanence beneath us, until the first stars should have begun to appear, but they would not come.
––one of those round-eyed men had nodded a bit more, his eyes now milk-white as they rolled back in his head. He was Bela Lugosi’s great-grandson, and held up his hands to prove it, the family resemblance visible in the ten long, draping fingers of horror that he thrust in my face, missing only a sweet, papery neck for them to grasp. Dracula’s bloodline reduced to this party trick. I must have said something funny, since he clapped those huge pale spiders together like it was the first time like he had ever felt that swelling of air inside, his own body betraying him with a howl of a laugh. I wondered if he had ever tasted blood beyond his own bitten lip, if he could even smell blood in the water despite those shark’s eyes. I never saw him again. It seems to me that when you can’t find time, not much is funny anymore, not really. Not when laughter is so tense and so hideous, all those chokes and gasps, little bits of spittle, bared teeth. Regardless, I’d like to try out a joke before the sun goes down, but when I open my mouth, my tongue flicks in and out, wet and forked. Named for what I’m not, I don’t even have a punch line to forget.