Oct 13: BAT
You’re watching a surreal Italian horror movie and a bat is ravaging a woman’s hair, trying to bite at her face.
It’s a stuffed monster. Real bats don’t do that.
…
You wake. It’s a hot night, the window is open. Something dark flutters in the room.
“It’s nothing.”
You go back to sleep.
…
The next day you see pinprick marks of a miniature vampire bite on your hand. Seriously, a two-inch-high vampire must have squeaked “I vant to suck your blood!” before gazing mermerizingly at your thumb. The marks scab over.
…
A month later you wake up to find yourself violently sexually aroused. You can’t swallow. It’s not that your throat is tight, although it is. It’s that water makes you panic.
Every muscle goes rigid. A friend who comes to pick you up for coffee instead screams and rushes you to the hospital.
Bitten…bitten…
Too late. They put you in a coma, a protocol for cases of the last resort. There have been six survivors.
It takes about a month for the symptoms to show, with rabies.
Vampirism, too.
The night nurse is a nun.
She waits for you with a stake.
Just in case.
…
If you liked this one, try Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik. I occasionally write second-person (“you”) stories; you can find another one in A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters & the Macabre, the one called “Abominable.”