by Bryan Belrad

Created on: January 06, 2009

*From "Born Evil"*

I watched with a kind of detached fascination as the needle came out of my arm. The crimson drop on its slender tip was a stark contrast to the cream colored latex glove that held it.

I kept staring, feeling the burning tingle in my arm begin to ease. I hated having blood drawn. It made me nauseous. To think back on that now, getting queasy at such a piddly thing God, I was pathetic.

I looked up into the eyes of my big black orderly, who was double-checking the measurement on the syringe. 10cc's, not a drop more or less.
He glanced down at me and gave me the half-smile you give an annoying child.

"Can you fall in love with life again?" I asked him.

Did I mention that I was out of my mind at the time?

He cocked an eyebrow, but didn't respond. No one ever did. They probably thought I was contagious. Little did they know

I had spent the last six months here at the scenic Tabutte Rest for the criminally insane. Of course, few among those of us doing the resting' ever got to partake of the scenic' part. They generally preferred that we stayed in.

They were running blood tests on me every day now. The doctors still had no clue why I was the way I was. The psychiatrists were sure I was bipolar, schizophrenic, or both.
The clinical folks didn't buy it, but they didn't have a better answer. The staff thought I was a vampire, despite the fact that I slept at night, had no problem with daylight, loved garlic, and got queasy at the sight of blood.

I could hear them talking sometimes, when they hung around the nurse's desk down the hall. They'd say things like I heard he killed her with his teeth. Tore her neck out.' Hence my mysterious vampirism, I supposed.

My orderly shoved a small handful of pills down my throat, then poured half a pitcher of water on top of them to force me to swallow. That, to me, was sufficient explanation for my mental state in and of itself.

Still, I did have something of a problem. I really did kill a woman, though I had no memory of how or why. I didn't know who she was, where she came from, or how she managed to get into my apartment. But none of that mattered. The bottom line was that on a lovely Tuesday morning, the police found me covered in blood with bits of flesh stuck in my teeth.

That wasn't the first time I'd woken up that way, either. Twice before, I'd come to beside a corpse, with no idea how it had gotten there. Both times, I had reason to believe that I had been directly responsible for each body's present state.

Any guesses

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