Debutante

Her parents did not allow her to be awake during daylight. So, perhaps, she was mistaken. SHE didn’t believe she was mistaken, because the shaggy shapes of trees she saw through the kitchen window at the bottom of the orchard garden approached the house during the endless seasons of dark childhood. Gradually, the moon got smaller, even in fullness, and the trees bigger or nearer. Too gradually to notice. But SHE did.

Where her parents went during the day, leaving her minderless, she did not wonder. The whole process seemed natural.

And at day-repair, she would rise from the wooden chest-bed and smooth out the crumbly turf at the bottom where she had lain the light long. Then, she lapped what the mother called tomato soup, a name which gave some consistency with the television adverts that the girl was allowed to watch to while away the hours till dawn.

And it was at dawn, with the girl back in her chest-bed, that the parents departed, singly, to find more tepid tomato soup for her breakfast tomorrow.

In later years, as the girl’s milk teeth fell out, two large ones began gradually to poke from the bed of upper gums, like alabaster tombstones. Amid such complexes, she began to have yearnings she couldn’t otherwise describe.

“It’s only the act of growing up, dear,” said the parents.

“But these teeth, they're too big for my mouth.”

The mother bit her tongue before nearly saying: “All the better to eat with, my dear.” Even to the mother, that would have taken things a little TOO far, in explaining away the foolish fears of childhood.

“All the better to smile with,” offered the father.

Then there was the coming-out ball.

She was done up in a flouncey floral frock, bibs and tucks at her young bust.

“You must look your prettiest tonight, my dear.”

“But my two front teeth are so ugly.”

All the girls she’d seen on the adverts had white sparkly smiles of even teeth.

“They’ll be pretty to those nice boys you’ll meet at the ball.”

“But YOUR teeth are even, Mummy.”

The father smiled, as he remembered first having the idea of buying the television. He had wondered then if it were something to do with a sadistic streak in his own make-up; but, now, he knew different as he had often since delighted in the daughter gnawing at his fingers as dogs would use butcher’s bones to cut their eye teeth on...

They left her question unanswered, as all three of them waited silently for the sound of hearse horses to take the girl to the first high stocking-top ball of the new season.

It was a relief her leaving childhood at last and no longer needing grown-ups to arrange blood changes, the aging couple mused. But as foster parents, it had really been the making of their marriage being given a handicapped orphan for whom to care.

Only the girl felt the Earth closing in...

Published 'The Vampire's Crypt 1991
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ANONYMOUS TALE

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