Bite Me

do what I say,” Tommy said, a little surprised to hear himself say it. “Wake her up, Foo.”
    JODY
    The last thing she remembered before burning up were the orange socks. And here they were again, fluorescent orange, highway safety orange socks, at the base of a tiny, blood-encrusted man who was fussing about at some sort of workbench.
    “Well, don’t you look yummy,” she said, and she was surprised at the sound of her own voice: dry, weak, and ancient.
    The little man turned, startled at first, but then he composed himself, bowed, and said something in Japanese. Then, “Sorry,” in English.
    “It’s okay,” she said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve woken up in a strange man’s apartment where I can’t remember how I got there.” This was, however, the first time she remembered where she had been on fire at the end of the night. Before it had gone quite that far, the girls she worked with held a lunchtime intervention in which each told her, frankly and sincerely, as people who loved her, that she was a drunken slut who took all the hot guys at the TGIF bar crawl every week and she needed to knock it the fuck off. So she did.
    Now, as in those days, she was disoriented, but unlike those days, it didn’t even occur to her to be afraid.
    The little Japanese man bowed again, then took a square-pointed knife from his workbench and approached her shyly, his head down, saying something that sounded very much like an apology. Jody held up her hand to wave him off, say, “Hey, back off there, cowboy,” but when she saw her hand, an ash-white desiccated claw, the words caught in her throat. The little man paused just the same.
    Her arms, her legs? She pulled up the kimono—her stomach, her breasts—she was shrunken, like a mummy. The effort exhausted her and she fell back into the pillow.
    The little man shuffled forward and held his hand up. There was a bandage on his thumb. She watched as he raised his hand, pulled off the bandage, and put the point of the knife to the wound that was already there. She caught his knife hand and ever so gently, pushed it down.
    “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No.”
    She couldn’t imagine what her face might look like. The ends of her hair were like brittle red straw. What must she have looked like before he had done this, done this too much, she could see.
    “No.”
    With him close, she could smell the blood on him. It wasn’t human. Pig. It smelled of pig, although she didn’t know how she might know that. When she had been at her best she would have smelled blood on someone just walking by on the sidewalk. It wasn’t only her strength that was gone, her senses were nearly as dull as when she had been human.
    The little man waited. He had bowed, but did not rise up again. Wait, he held his head aside, his throat open. He was bending down so she could drink. Knowing what she was, he was giving himself to her. She touched his cheek with the back of her hand and when he looked she shook her head. “No. Thank you. No.”
    He stood, looked at her, waited. She smelled the dried blood on the back of her hand, tasted it. She had tasted it before. She felt something tacky in the corner of her mouth—yes, it was the pig blood. The hunger wrenched through her, but she fought it down. He had fed her his own blood, obviously, but also pig’s blood. How long? How far had he brought her?
    She gestured for him to bring her paper and something to write with. He brought her a sketch pad and a broad square carpenter’s pencil. She drew a map of Union Square, then drew a crude figure of a woman and wrote down numbers, many numbers, her sizes. What about money? Rivera would have her things from the room, but she had hidden most of the money in another spot. From the brick-work in the apartment, the window frames, the angle of streetlights coming down from above, she guessed she was in a basement apartment right near where she’d been running on Jackson Street. Nowhere else in the City looked like this, was this old. She pointed to herself and the little man and then to the map.
    He took it from her and drew an X, then quickly drew a stick version of the Transamerica Pyramid. Yes. They wereon Jackson Street. She wrote a “ $ ” where she’d hidden the money, then scratched it out. It was hidden in a locked electrical junction box high on a roof, where she had been able to climb easily, two floors above the highest fire escape. This frail little guy would never