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I dip a glass in a bath-tub,
drink dirty water.
Soaping together—that
is sacred to me. Washing mouths together.
You can fuck
anyone—but with whom can you sit in water?
— Ilya Kaminsky, After Bombardment, Sonya
୨ৎ
Anything had before the turning the body will get to keep. Madeleine, for instance, still has the petite pricks in her thumbs.
Claudia still has her hope. She would detest herself for it if this wasn't her view: the outskirts of Paris lined up like a loose ribbon before her window, gleaming gold through the night. There is a short embroidered curtain hanging from left to right to dim the glow.
She's wearing an aged but decent blouse that she had taken from the theater as an act of spite, the silhouette of her bare body taking the space it has to. Her shorts were handcrafted by her companion on a rather dull night in which their apartment had only been two coffins and a singular flower Armand had gifted to them that she left to rot on a dresser the previous homeowners had left.
Her feet are bare. Her thighs are kissing. When she turns around, there is the same puddle of red wine dried into the floorboards, another night less dull that had raised the hopeless question of what if we're still human enough for wine. Of course the answer was no. But Claudia enjoyed the view of Madeleine's pursed lips from her despondency upon the realization. She poured the bottle out over her palm and watched it drip.
Bloody. She said, in her thorough and raw accent. They plan on visiting Madeleine's hometown one day. Claudia tells her about New Orleans and Madeleine has been speaking about being on boats more often.
Intricacies. She wonders what ghost stories now inundate the marmor and plaster of Rue Royale.
They'll have to get a carpet for it. Something circular and neat.
She grabs a notebook and pen and notes something about feeling ready. Her entire life has been an anticipation: of satiation, of a body, of a body to her body, of her body with bodies all hungering for the same satiation she's been searching for.
She got real close to it. Got an outline of it. It's just not the Parisian coven, in all its figures and laws and condemnation.
Madeleine, in contrasting clemency, is a hundred things, a hundred people. Some days she's a machine, sewing, sewing, ripping fabric apart to sew it to something else. Other days she's a cartographer, tracing the roads that stretch over Claudia's body, the hills of her ribcage, the valley where her hips attach to her legs.
Then, of course, she's still scared some nights. She still ponders and she perhaps has never truly left her sister's grave. Madeleine becomes simply a woman without any other connotations. Claudia likes that her fingers are long and slender but not bone. She likes her voice when it becomes deeper the longer the night goes. Her thoughts are never repetitions but additions to what Claudia is saying.
And Madeleine treats her as a woman also. No connotations. No contradiction. She kisses her like a woman. She trusts Claudia like women trust each other.
When the door clicks open and Claudia smells that lingering scent of death, she wonders if anticipation is still worth having. Perhaps for mundane things. Like living long enough together to wander back into the sun like some ancient ones can. Or playing the rounds of chess she could never finish because Lestat's pride didn't allow it. A train ride to Auvergne. Sleeping in the wide mouth of a meadow where everything is both sharp and soft.
“Chouette,” She hears, and smiles to herself.
Claudia grabs a cigarette and a lighter that she placed down in the hallway, the tobacco coming ablaze as she finds Madeleine at the front door, hands in gloves and a neat hat slanted fashionably on her head. Her face is flushed rosé.
“How was your hunt?”
“Ah,” She exhales as Claudia inhales, and then she hands her companion her cigarette. Madeleine slides the thin shawl from her throat and lets her heels clack on the ground.
The neighbor downstairs is deaf. A quiet perfection in their otherwise turbulent life. Madeleine takes a frantic drag and returns with another pair of gloves that are tailored to Claudia's hands. She can sense where this is going.
“Help me with the body, s'il te plait.”
And she laughs. It's really dark outside and she laughs.
⋆
The stairs remind Claudia of Louis' teeth.
Perhaps a weird comparison to draw, but in the confinement of morning soil and shabby vegetable bags all across eastern Europe, he drew open-mouthed breaths and she watched.
She named some of them. Sunny, Daphne, Martha, Emily. They all had character because they weren't perfect. And Louis brooded both when he spoke and when he simply existed in the trance of unconsciousness. His body molded to fit into an eternal melancholy — her trying to form it anew with hands that are also made of clay.
Bendable. She dismisses the train of thought as the front door cracks open to Madeleine's Cadillac, sleek red and gorgeous, their baby, with the aura of decay in the backseat.
The lipstick Madeleine wears is handsome and dark. Some of it is smeared beneath her bottom lip. Claudia wants to bite into her like she would the pears her aunt always soundlessly left for her. Another thought to dismiss, at least until she's in the coffin.
“He died of a heart attack before I could really drain him.” Madeleine sighs as she opens the door to milky eyes of a man in suit and tie, mouth ajar. Textbook dead, even got a cardiac arrest, but unusual burying. Claudia drops her cigarette and puts it out with the lip of her flat, a little drowsy, definitely not looking forward to the shoveling.
She's glad that Madeleine's a good student. How many vampires have been lost to the inferno of indulgence? Madeleine ain't like the others, though. And Claudia can't shake a second smile as the body is dragged out onto the ground.
“For next time,” Claudia starts with that tone in her voice that she both likes and despises. “Try killing closer to a body of water.”
Lestat would've crucified her. Louis would've let her have it. That's how she knows she's right.
“I know, I know.” Madeleine sing-songs, and it all sounds kind of funny when her accent is so strong. “It just irked me how he wouldn't stop chewing on his toothpick.”
Irked me? Is that right? Her companion asks telepathically and Claudia nods.
The house they live in stands surrounded by lively isolation, a drive past a field, through a village, and then there they are. A hasty walk further down the street and it's just forests for a few kilometers. A perfect home for a vampire, or two.
Claudia has always been in cities. And the forests she saw were so stripped by war that every glimpse into them felt like an act of voyeurism. France is green. The wide garden behind the house is green. And if it isn't green then it gets gray but it's better than the beiges and browns of stuffy theater walls.
Little birdy loves the breeze and whatnot. What a bunch of fuckers. Madeleine snickers and that's how she knows that she's following her thoughts.
“You like that?” Claudia asks as she reaches for the man's feet, pliant in her grip, sometimes so loose she's scared they'll just slither off.
“I like your mind.” Madeleine says with the sort of casualty that dismantles her right at the center of her soul.
She grabs the arms and then they begin heading behind the house, past the glowing windows of their neighbor's kitchen, down further until they find a proper place to dig into. Madeleine walks back to grab their shovels, each of them already chipping at the blade from how often they happen to use them. They made friends at the market where they regularly purchase flowers to justify any other tools they might use for reasons beyond gardening.
And Claudia always has enjoyed flowers. And she wants to make friends with the women sitting under their pavilions growing these flowers that are now rowed up neatly in front of their windows.
Madeleine hums a melody that Claudia vaguely recalls having heard before. Then she stops. Her face is impossibly pale even with the temporary life that blood gives them, and her eyes are so wide that they always appear to be bulging out with all the love she has for all the things she sees.
The war ceased and now everything is poignantly urging them to give in. Claudia thinks about the irony of this sentimentality as she's staring down at a corpse in an unkempt garden. Tall grass. Madeleine's biting at her inner cheek.
She hands her a shovel and there's that universal expression. Something's plaguing her and it has been since she returned. Claudia assumed so from how her brows were shifting like a car gear, up and down.
“Pardon. It is stupid,” And Claudia shakes her head though she very well believes that Madeleine too is capable of asking ridiculous things.
“Do you think we're evil? God is dead, but I get this, uh, feeling sometimes.”
Claudia scoffs. She looks Madeleine directly in the eyes.
“The world isn't kind to us, so we don't have to be kind to it either.” Cynical and a touch of de Lioncourt in every bold opinion she gives. “You sounded a whole lot more confident about this when you were talking to Armand.”
“I had to convince him somehow.” A pause. A look up at Claudia and she shakes her head. “Cet idiot.”
That makes her laugh. “He could read your mind, you know.”
“I don't think he did.”
Madeleine attempts to lift the shovel from where she placed it on the ground, but Claudia gets to her wrist faster. She puts her into an awkward position, gaze shooting up, now smaller than the other vampire.
“We have to eat, Madeleine. Just because you're one of the lucky ones who got to choose to be turned doesn't mean you're more evil.” She runs her thumb along the lukewarm skin. “There's evil out there but it's not you.”
A justification follows with no hesitation: “I do not regret this.”
“I know.” Claudia lets her go and stabs her shovel into the mud. She's very aware that Madeleine is doing nothing but keeping her gaze on her as she works a first hole into the ground.
Then they shovel together, sometimes across from each other, then beside, then shoulder to shoulder. They dig deep enough for a body, practiced and through their biology effortless. Madeleine puts a sweet kiss to her cheek before she grabs one of the man's arms once more and carelessly drags him into the hole, his body turned upwards facing the night sky. Claudia huffs and begins filling the space again. They do not take long, and the floor is fertile enough to regrow the patch of grass soon. They examine their work and Madeleine lets her wave of existential morality pass by with the burial.
“I feel filthy.” Claudia says to break the silence. There's dirt on her shins from having kneeled to flatten out the grave. The air is frigid in an uncomfortable way.
Madeleine turns to her, takes her gloved hands, and puts a kiss to her palms.
“The trousers suit you.”
⋆
The water keeps giving birth to bubbles. Maybe they overfilled the tub, but it matters little. Madeleine strips before her with a sly look over shoulder before dipping in, disappearing behind the gentle wall they have built. Claudia removes her tights, then her shorts, then her shirt. The jewelry comes after as a calculated mistake to keep the attention on her.
(As if it has ever wavered. Makes her flush just thinking about it. Some wars are worth fighting for. Helen of Troy.)
Her undergarments go with a tranquility only Madeleine grants her. She steps across the room and into the womb of the tub, both of them before each other, with only heads among the wet clouds. Their knuckles brush, and Madeleine slips a hand under to put it around her ankle.
Claudia likes her hair undone. She also likes it tightly pinned to her head, or in a loose ponytail on more lazy days. Kohl around her eyes. Eyes bare. Fingers decked out in rings. Blood seeping around her nail bed. A book in hands. Her fingers inside her.
She smiles and Madeleine brushes her thumb over the pearl of her ankle, no longer despondent, but arriving at a point of momentary bliss.
Claudia, and it is just as stupid as Madeleine's question, can't believe a house could ever be this quiet. The water stirs and she leans back until her spine sits on cold porcelain, pushing a sigh out of her lips.
“I do miss wine.”
In the well of her vision she watches her companion grab a pack of cigarettes from one pocket of her pants and light it with a match, the tobacco coming alive with a sweet orange flow that blurs in all this haziness.
She leans forward and Claudia sits up so she can take the cigarette into her mouth.
A freedom. To smoke and to never rot.
“I miss cake.” She admits, innocently but still with a rawness to her tone. Madeleine laughs.
“Yes, cake.” Her mouth becomes a button. A new dare in her expression. "Do you miss the sun?"
Claudia exhales.
"You can't miss something that's there. I sometimes see it through the curtains. I can feel the warmth on my skin and," Claudia cuts herself off because Madeleine's hair runs down her neck like oil and she has something to say.
“You can miss something that's there.” She draws closer by pushing herself forward with her palms until she's sitting between Claudia's legs. “Do you not miss Louis?”
“Yeah, I miss him. But he isn't here.”
“Ah,” Madeleine starts, putting two hands on her ribcage. Her eyes are gleaming and pink. Forever captured in that moment when she was lying on a table fighting for what Claudia had hidden from her.
An existence tainted by shame and perversion for once actually becoming something sacred. Hiding together. A paradoxical thing.
“But he is in the walls. He is in your dreams when you mutter to yourself and I do not have the heart to wake you. He is in the sage colored fabric of your dress and he loves you so much it seeps from Paris to here.”
“It ain't a long distance between us and Paris.”
“Chouette.” She scolds, putting a kiss to Claudia's forehead before she asks her to turn around.
With her back to Madeleine and lukewarm water falling over her skin, she answers truthfully. “I get what you mean, though.”
And she really does, she really does. She wasn't at the epitome of happiness when they sat at the same café tables pretending to drink the petite Americanos they were being served, but Claudia was more than content, bitterly relieved that Louis was sitting across from her with a toothy grin and the flash of his camera.
Not to mention the weird taste she got in her mouth whenever she referred to him as her brother. And the odd pool of warmth in her chest when he'd tell strangers on the square that she was his daughter to charm their illusion of satisfaction.
He calls her sometimes. Patiently, either through the stream of vampiric voices all interlaced in one bundle of a network or through the telephone, and she doesn't always pick up. Part of her is bitter that he's still there, or about the things he said to grant her wishes. Or how she would hear Lestat's name through gritted teeth when he'd assume he's far enough for her not to hear.
It's not the grieving that irritated her. It's the fact that he pretended to be entirely unaffected. Liberated, through killing his maker. Muttering and moaning from a very personal agony that he chose to hide in the red room.
Louis’ sainthood has made him ineffably guilty. And Claudia picks up most calls knowing he loves her despite this continuing Greek tragedy they have been written into by a force greater than man but too damned for god.
Madeleine grabs a bottle of soap and puts two hot breaths to her palms to warm it up. She brushes the liquid as far as the water lets her and whispers to herself in French.
“Tell me something about your family.” Claudia demands, looking across the room. Mosaic upon mosaic, something she longed for in younger journals. A simplicity.
“My mother taught me how to sew. My father was very good at cutting things out of wood.” Her hand slides from her back to Claudia's collarbone. It smells of honey. “My sister liked numbers very much. She was very good at math. I suppose it was because it required not so many words.”
Claudia hums. “You're good with words.”
“So are you.” Madeleine says, going from a kneeling position to caging Claudia in with her thighs. “When you're not reading a script, Puce.”
The cigarette dies when Claudia puts it out on the beige lip of the tub. “Do not remind me.”
(As if it all happened years ago.)
“Those fuckers.” Madeleine repeats and Claudia cracks up, head thrown back and at some point in her companion's shoulder, toying with one of her hands, spreading her fingers apart with her own, and then putting Madeleine's ring finger into her mouth just to feel how life has already ceased there.
They sit for a while. Until the water goes cold but they do not mind. A hand comes down on her stomach, drawing circles and nonsensical shapes as an excuse to keep touching.
“Madeleine,” Claudia breathes, and she gets this feeling that the sun isn't far.
A mouth to her ear. Tender and not impossible. Very possible. Thrilling through its possibility. “Oui?”
“God will forgive us.”
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