Vampire Boys / by grace mcgrade

In fairy tales, they speak of monsters and love, monsters and love as two seperate things. They don’t speak about love being a disease, bone-crushing, infectious. Like a wildfire, destroying everything in it's path. Or how sometimes monsters are dre…

In fairy tales, they speak of monsters and love, monsters and love as two seperate things. They don’t speak about love being a disease, bone-crushing, infectious. Like a wildfire, destroying everything in it's path. Or how sometimes monsters are dressed as beautiful young men, disguised as lovers, who come right to your doorstep. Like flowers of premonition.

How some monsters have shiny smiles, and glistening eyes, who say things like “Please forgive me,” and “I love you.” How sometimes, monsters and love become the same thing, and you let someone drain you until you are empty, and they are full.



He lived in a cave and he felt like a cave. A cave amidst canyons bleeding wildflowers and hallucinatory purples. He felt like a cave carrying centuries, his chest reverberating with a song you couldn’t name, but you knew from somewhere. His smoky throat and unbalanced breath let out fumes that immobilized me, like airborne paralysis.He held me fiercely, as if we only had one night before he had to go back, return to the deepest cave, evaporate, tumble back into darkness. It was sick, it made me sick, how much I wanted him. He was as fucked up as I was. Can you imagine the two of us together? Fucking each other up. In the morning I would wake up trying to recall how far down we went, which subterranean chamber I had abandoned bits of myself in,this time.


He was alien, a hundred folded galaxies, funnelled tightly through a body, like an ill fitting suit.

Wearing seven jackets from different decades and cowboy boots. When I didn’t think about him I only thought in planets, and in that way, I think he kept me here. I saw him fully and it terrified him.I was an echo of him, when he didn’t want a mirror or a magnifying glass. He wanted a distraction, he wanted entertainment, and I just wanted to see him get free. I didn’t want to be his girlfriend, I wanted to be his epiphany.


I gave up on fragility and subtlety long ago, but I feel too much, and he didn’t protect me. I would have given him my heart and my eyes and woven a tapestry of all my favorite feelings and handed them to him, if he had just stuck around and kept kissing me. The kisses that sent electroshocks through my vertebrae, kisses with nanoseconds of blue lights, flickering in my minds eye, like old film on a screen. Instead he dragged me to hollow, dark places. At 3 am all the pretty people, all the models, look like waxed faced corpses and I am so sensitive, I see everyone’s sadness. Hollow, Hollowood. Empty.