Bite Me

most awesome alabaster naked badassness and freak him completely the fuck out for failing me in Biology, and that it would be kind of an inhuman thing to do. And as I grieved, I fell into the deep sleep of the undead.
    I know. Très awesome.
    But no! Now I’m awake, and it’s still light out, and the vamp rats are still out and I don’t have super powers and my evil is still totally speakable. Fucksocks! I forgot, I have to die before I change. I looked all over for that potassium chloride stuff that Foo said they killed the rats with, but all I found was the hammer, and I was all, “I don’t think so.” So I went up to Market Street and thought I’d throw myself in front of a bus, but then, what if they left my body out in the sun and I burned up? So that was out. So then I was like, “Oh, duh, cut your wrists?” But it hurt like holy fuck, so Ionly kind of cut one wrist a little bit, and I bled for like a half hour and I wasn’t even light-headed, so I was all, “Fuck this fun-free circus, I need an accomplice.”
    So I called the suicide hotline.
    And I’m all, “I need help.”
    And the guy is all, “What’s your name?”
    And I’m all, “You don’t have caller ID? What kind of lame hotline is this?”
    And he’s all, “It says here that your name is Allison. Are you okay, Allison?”
    And I’m all, “No, I’m not okay. I’m calling the suicide hotline.”
    And he’s all, “You don’t want to commit suicide, Allison.”
    And I’m all, “Exactly, doofasaurus, I need someone to take me out. I need it to be quick, private, painless, and it shouldn’t fuck up my hair too much.”
    And he’s like, “But there’s so much to live for.”
    So I’m like, “You’re burning my minutes, fuckstick. I need a number for a hit man or one of those Kevorkian doctors.”
    And he’s all, “I can’t help you with that.”
    So I’m all, “Loser!” And I offed my phone.
    I can’t believe it, but it turns out that the Motherbot was right. Sometimes, the only people you can trust are family. (“’Scuse me, I barely suppressed a rainbow yawn when I typed that.) So here I am, waiting for my little sister, Ronnie, to get home from school so she can murderme, then hide my body under the bed until I return as the true Mistress of the Greater Bay Area Dark. This will be my last entry as a mortal. I have to go pick out an ensem for my death.
    I wonder how she’ll do it? It better be painless or the first thing on my undead to-do list will be to open a bottle of Whoop-Ass P.M. on little sister.

14
The Samurai of Jackson Street II
    K atusumi Okata had lived among the gaijin for forty years. An American art dealer, traveling through Hokkaido in search of woodblock prints from the Edo period, had come into Katusumi’s father’s workshop, seen the boy’s prints, and offered to bring Okata to San Francisco to create prints for his gallery on Jackson Street. The printmaker had lived in this same basement apartment since. He’d once had a wife, Yuriko, but she had been killed in front of him on the street when he was twenty-three, so now he lived alone.
    The apartment had a concrete floor covered by two grass mats, a table that held his printmaking tools, a two-burner stove, an electric kettle, his swords, a futon, three sets of clothes, an old phonograph, and now, a burned-up white woman. She really didn’t go with anything else, no matter how he arranged her.
    He thought he might make a series of prints of her—her blackened, skeletal form posed about the apartment like some demon wraith from a Shinto nightmare, but the composition wasn’t working. He walked up to Chinatown and bought a bouquet of red tulips and put them on the futon beside her, but even with the added color and design element, the picture wasn’t working. And she was making his futon smell like burned hair.
    Okata was not used to company, and he wasn’t sure how to keep up his end of the conversation. He had once made friends with two rats who came out of a hole in the brick wall. He had talked to them and fed them on the condition that they not bring any friends, but they hadn’t listened and he was forced to mortar up the hole. He figured they didn’t speak Japanese.
    To be fair, however, she wasn’t doing very well holding up her side of the conversation, either—lying there like a bog person dipped in creosote, her mouth open as if in a scream of agony. He sat on a stool next to the futon with his sketch pad and a