VAMPIRE AND SKULL (Public Domain)

                                               College Freshman, age 22 

First of all, I bummed around a lot before deciding to go to college. Even though I enjoyed tinkering with cars, I listened to my father who kept telling me I was a bum, that I needed to get a college education if I wanted to amount to anything.

As if that wasn't enough, I met this girl named Sadie, who started in on me, too. "You want to marry me," she said, "better go to college so you can earn big bucks someday and amount to something."

Here I am at twenty-two, trying to fit in with students right out of high school, all of them seeming to be much brighter than I am. Tests, projects, homework--it all came down on me like a ton of bricks. Today I decided was my last day of college. That's it. I've had it beating myself silly, hitting the books, and getting nothing back in return.

Walking a different route home--I figured I'd break the monotony of my life in every way--I saw your sign outside: BLOOD IS THICKER THAN WATER--and decided to stop and buy an admission ticket. A good vampire play is just what I need. All the pressures of my life have been kind of like vampires wanting blood, sucking me dry.

                                                Corporate Tax Attorney, age 48

Ever hear of the Great American Dream? Well, say hello to the sucker who bought into it.  Yeah, you're looking at him. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.  

What the hell happened? The four words I ask myself every morning when I wake up.  And sometimes I pray hard I just sleep through it all and never wake up again. You go to the factory or to the shop or to your office hoping this will be the day your lottery number comes up and you're a millionaire with lots of money to buy all your heart desires. What you earn is not enough, never enough to make this life of yours comfortable. My advice,  you ought to rethink that, pal.

I can't mention the corporation I work for, but they're big guys: billion-dollar big with enough green  to buy everybody's soul and still have money left over to throw a huge party in hell.

I am one of the big guys there. I do corporate tax. That is, until recently when I started doing the corporation out of as much money as I could manage to get away with. I was pulling down nearly 200 grand a year, but it wasn't enough. The old lady wanted this; she wanted that. For God's sake, she wanted everything she could get her eyes on!  But it was my own doing that led to my undoing. I devised a way to extract funds out of the accounts of our corporate clients--not a perceptibly great deal, but enough, it turned out, to draw the attention of Jim Caruthers. Now there’s a vampire for you. On your neck quicker than you can say “Jackie Robinson“ or My math is off” or “I did it for Francine.”                                                  

Let me tell you about Caruthers: Big Jim Caruthers, President of the corporation that will remain anonymous here. My boss. The guy who signed my paychecks and my bonus checks and all those extra perc checks I got every time I turned around. He liked to think of himself as a sort of rich, old uncle, someone to go to with a problem. Caruthers, who should have been a guidance counselor, became president of the corporation, earning millions.

Today I got the pink slip. Today I cleaned out my desk and chucked everything in the garbage. Francine doesn't know yet that I am going to be arrested tomorrow morning for heavy embezzlement. And Francine will not hear it from me either.

I was passing by, my throat dry as parchment, when I decided to stop by and have a drink or two. Then the bartender mentioned your play BLOOD IS THICKER THAN WATER, and I thought, What the hell! It'll be my last night out. On the way home I'll drive my Mercedes convertible over the railing and wave goodbye to this mess I'm in. You only go around once, I know that, but in the last couple of months I have lived ten lives. I'll be relieved when it's over. And unlike Lord Sangrador, the star of your play, I am not coming back to live forever. I’m a thief, but I ain’t no sucker!

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                                                       Housewife, age 24

 Do I look like a woman who's been married for under three weeks? Is there a happy glow to my face, a smile that won't quit?

 No and no and one more no. I’m miserable. Marrying Tom should have turned my gray skies to blue but all it did was turn my nights and days to blue. In fact, if you had to color me any color in the whole wide world, that color would definitely be blue.

 At twenty-four, you can't argue I married too young. Or too old for that matter. Tom was everything I had always wished for. Take it from me: be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.

Tom was a wish come true, I thought at first, but even as early as the honeymoon I saw a different side of him. Life had suddenly become a living nightmare.

All those love words were lies. All his promises had no meaning. Opening the car door for me, saying how pretty I looked, taking me here and there to show off to his friends--what the hell did all of that mean?  

Last month on the first night of our honeymoon, he stayed downstairs in the all-night bar, boozing it up with whoever would listen to him. On the second night when I asked him, "Tom, here's a suggestion: the two of us spend the night together. After all, we're married now!" He slapped me. Then he slapped me again. With that he walked back downstairs to drink the second night away. 

So this was the honeymoon in sunny Hawaii. When we returned home, he kept to himself, practically ignored me.

“Why the hell did you marry me for anyway?" I asked, but he didn't bother to reply except with the back of his hand across my face. 

He's threatened to kill me if I try to leave him or if I tell anyone he's abusing me. But I am not so dumb to think I can survive if I stay with that madman. 

I'm treating myself to dinner and your play. I want to sit back and watch vampires act out a mystery. When it's done, there's a bus that will take me to the Port of Authority Terminal in New York City. Then I'll take another bus to my sister in Santa Fe. Her husband’s got fangs like your Lord Sangrador, but the old bastard’s harmless. I’ll be all right.

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                                               Retired Bricklayer, age 80

You should've seen me back in the old days! I wasn’t somebody you'd fool with.  Now these hands, bent and arthritic––ugly even, you might say––buback in the forties, with one hand tied behind my back, I could lay mortar down, build walls straight and strong, quicker than the crew boss, quicker than anybody. I had magic hands. 

That was a long time ago, I'll give you that. Now when you drive your fancy cars down Harrison Avenue, do you look at all the houses and think they just happened, you know, like houses  suddenly fell from out of the blue sky? Not on your life! I built them with these two hands. I put them up brick by brick, twelve, thirteen hours a day, and I'd come home and Rosalia would gently clean the cuts on my hands and somehow the bleeding would stop until the next day when it would start again with new bricks or the sharpness of the trowel. That poor woman was a saint! She'd mend my hands, look at them with those sad eyes that wished I could save those hands, stay away from the building trade, but what she never could understand was how much I loved to take a house from nothing, from a concrete foundation and build it high and wide as they wanted it to go.

Rosalia didn't live long enough to see me retire, to keep me company in my old years.  And in '95 I lost a son.He was everything to me!

Your play was good. I liked how you made it funny. Bloodsuckers all over the stage and we’re out there laughing our heads off!  I just bought one ticket for myself.

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                                             Hematologist, age 46 

Most people forget the word "Hematologist" and call guys like me blood specialists. I don't mind. I call vampires "bloodsuckers" and I haven't heard any complaints from them so far!

Hematologists, my wife Sandra likes to tell people, are very weird. She's met a few of my "blood" brothers--fellow hematologists--and she's convinced we go into that medical specialty because we love the sight of blood. It doesn't matter I've told her over and over again everyone of us experienced at least one fainting drop to the surgery-room floor when we were forced to look at a human body being drained of blood. You see, the minute you hear that bucklet kerplunk on the marble floor, then the gush of blood streaming down into it like a heavy rain. Not easy to stand up for that, not until you get used to it. Now when I see blood during an operation, I tell myself, this blood is paying my summer home in the Cayman Islands. A little red for lots of green. A fair exchange, I'd say.

Sandra didn't want to come tonight. "What's with you?" she asked me. "A vampire play, for crying out loud!  Don't you see enough blood all day you have to go watch some disgusting vampire biting people's necks?"

"I heard it's a mystery, Sandra," I tried to tell her.

"Yeah, a real mystery," she replied.

It's a night out, away from the office and the hospital. Bring on the dancing vampires.  Start the bloody show already!"

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                                          Stand-up Comic, age 32 

It's a living. What can I tell you. I get up on stage and make people laugh. Don't think it's always so damn easy; it ain‘t. Some nights I want to cry, let alone make jokes, and I'm sure if I did cry, the audience would still laugh.

They're out there programmed for comedy. They know what to expect and they'll react to every punchline. Why, once I got up there and told how ripped up I was about my Uncle Bennie dying just two days before. I explained how all that pain had made him miserable: they laughed. I explained how wasted away Uncle Bennie had become. They went hysterical. No matter what I said, no matter how depressingly sad, that audience responded with all-out laughter. When you give an audience a comedian, they know what to do.

A play about vampires sounds serious enough. I'm sure the audience will know its job: pay attention, look for clues, figure out who stole the vampire's heart, and don't laugh. 

I stopped in so I could get away from the pressures of all that canned laughter. I need serious right now; I need to not perform, but to have others perform for me. There's nothing humorous about vampires. It'll be good for a change not to hear people laugh.   

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 Salvatore Buttaci’s two collections of flash fiction 200 Shorts and Flashing My Shorts are both published by All Things That Matter Press and are available in book and Kindle editions at http://www.kindlegraph.com/authors/sambpoet  

His new book If Roosters Don’t Crow, It Is Still Morning: Haiku and Other Poems http://tinyurl.com/76akl73  

Buttaci lives in West Virginia with Sharon, the love of his life.