Til Death

It’s a little after ten in the morning on the third day of your honeymoon, and I sit at your kitchen table, brand new knife in hand, whittling the end of a broken chair leg into a sharp point. You sit beside me, sipping coffee as you break another leg off the chair we destroyed to make wooden stakes. You look pallid and wan, as if you didn’t sleep well last night. “Remind me why we’re doing this again,” you say, blowing on your coffee. I know you know—you just want to hear me say something to fill the preternatural quiet between us. “Because you married a vampire.” “I didn’t know…” Lame excuse. And really, it’s too late now anyway. Annaleigh sleeps beneath our feet, hidden away in the basement in a coffin filled with graveyard dirt. You woke last night to find her lips locked around your wrist, her teeth sunk into your vein. Her mouth was red with your blood. In the morning light, the bite marks look bruised and angry. It’s just the two of us here in your kitchen. “Will this work?” you ask. To be honest, I don’t know. But it has to.