Oupire

By: LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Despair found me a dozen steps from the hangman’s tree dazed by pre-dawn hush, squinting at the bark’s myriad imperfections and odd notches, some similar to letters. Wait. Did someone carve oupire? Impossible. Yet the word broke through the bastion of my thoughts, its sinister meaning slipping into my awareness like a skilled burglar. My attraction to broken wings, broken men, generated a low drone of dread, my lips parched with dry gloom and unuttered yearning. A moral failing.

A shadow bewitched the branches, thrilling me with a swoop of dark energy. Large footprints impressed the damp turf, great ghost ships of shoes. A tall, lean figure moved towards me, skullish in his gauntness and unworldly pallor, attire too formal for a forest trek. Rivulets of red streaked his stare, eyes all undimmed shock as if staring into questions that are invisible to mortals. Could he detect my goosebumps from my silhouette in poisoned starlight?

Suddenly, he covered my bare shoulders – with the plushest cashmere scarf or cape – saying that we must not keep friends waiting, urgency whispered with a heavy accent, betraying the lisp of a secret woe or ill-fitting dentures.

As my free hand clasped the fabric, my coil of rope slid to the ground. Untethered, I let the stranger usher me through the red moon’s mist onto a gravel path as if we’d both made a bargain under our shared sky.

. . .

Note: Oupire is the Polish word for vampire.