I love my mother. I would never kill for her, but I would move a body for her, and have, and am.

The microwave, with its infrared vow to have and to hold in five minutes or sooner, is immaculate. I open the refrigerator. This isn?t my kitchen, but there?s a bottle of Coke with my name on it, literally. I move everything to the counter and deposit the body. It?s Christmas Eve, and the wife and daughter pictured on the refrigerator are already on vacation. He?s going to miss his flight to join them. I take my ski mask off and twist the cap on the Coke. The TV in the adjoining living room turns on. As I walk over to turn it off, Rod Serling says, ?Submitted for your approval: one Maria Flores, the child of a child of the night, who will now be visited by the ghost of Christmas Otherwise and given one last look at everything she?ll never have in the Twilight Zone.? I don?t remember this episode.
?Pick a card,? says someone behind me. I didn?t hear her walking down the carpeted stairs. She?s opening a new pack of cards and dressed as a stage magician, cape and all. This must be a Home Alone situation. She walks up to me like she?s not old enough to be afraid of a trespassing stranger in black and fans the cards out.
?Hey kid, where?s your family?? I humor her and pick a card.
?I?ll tell you after this trick. Is this your card?? she asks taking the top card.
?No.?
?Is this your card??
?No.?
?Is this your card??
?No, I?m still holding my card. You never asked for it back.?
?That?s what makes the trick so impressive,? she says. She goes through the deck one card after another. She never shuffled, so the cards are still in order. The nine of spades isn?t my card; the ten of spades isn?t my card. We both laugh, and the joke just keeps getting funnier and funnier; I don?t know why her mom left her. She runs out of cards, and I?m still holding mine. She tells me to keep it and slides the rest back into the pack. She pulls a wand out, taps the pack, and then holds it to her forehead. ?Pepsi, mold, and a vampire.?
She hands me the pack of cards. It?s light. It?s still sealed, too; the sticker hasn?t been broken. I open it, and there?s an origami crab inside. I unfold the paper, which reads, ?What three things are all Americans afraid to find in their refrigerators??
?Your mother didn?t finish him,? she says. ?She didn?t drain him all the way.? There?s a rasping on the inside of the refrigerator door. Before I can catch her, she runs right up to the refrigerator.
I hear a scream and then a pop like opening a bottle of Snapple with a pause in between long enough to bite someone. I put the mask back on and wait a few moments for the atomized blood to settle before going into the kitchen. Respiratory transmission is unrecorded but theoretically possible. The kitchen is painted in once-a-year red, the red of new plastic on Christmas Day. She?s sitting on the floor with an index and middle on the jugular. She looks terror-stricken. The normal response is panic, or at least shock. ?Once something happens, it never stops happening,? she says to nobody in particular.
?Where?s your first aid kit??
?Once something happens, it never stops happening.?
?Look honey, I know vampires are scary, but he wasn?t invited, so he exploded.?
I imagine that on her dad?s tombstone. ?He wasn?t invited, so he exploded.?
?Can you tell me where the first aid kit is?? I ask.
?I?m gonna need more than that.? She?s quick. ?Once something happens, it never stops happening.?
?I know, child, but this will all be over soon.?
?You don?t know, and I?m not a child. I?m a genie.?
She?s delirious. ?Hi Jeannie, I?m a Maria.?
?Me, too. My name?s Maria, and I?m a genie. It says so right on my bottle.?
I glance at Coke bottle with ?Maria? on it. ?You?re a genie in a bottle.?
?I was, yeah.?
This is stupid. ?I wish that you were healed and cured.?
?You?re stupid. That?s two wishes, and you can?t make wishes for other people.?
I?ve found Band-Aids and a facecloth that I?m running under water. Young vampires have short fangs; the wound might not be that deep. ?What do you think that I should wish for?? This?ll be easier if she?s distracted.
?You should wish to know how many wishes you have.?
?I?m not that stupid. Genies are bound to their masters until they?ve granted three wishes.? They?re shallow wounds. She?ll heal once she turns anyway, but it would feel wrong to leave a kid bleeding on the floor.
She laughs as I clean her neck up. ?You?re bound to me.?
?Fine, I wish that I knew how many wishes I have.?
?Three. Well, two now.?
I look around. The neighbors will notice the blood on the window tomorrow. ?I wish that I didn?t have to clean this up.?
Her face lights up. ?That?s my next trick!? She ushers me back into the living room and stands in the doorway. ?Focus on the doorway.?
?Okay.?
?Really focus.?
?I am.?
?Don?t let anything distract you.? I wonder if I was this annoying as a girl. She lifts her cape up and covers as much of the doorway as she can with it. When she drops it, the kitchen and she are clean.
?How did you do that?? I ask. ?How did you clean the kitchen that fast??
?I did more than that,? she says. ?I changed the whole house. Take a look.?
I turn around. I?m in a different living room. There?s a Christmas tree with presents under it in this one. ?What happened to your house??
?That wasn?t my house, and he wasn?t my dad.?
I don?t know what to do, so I reach for my phone to call my mother. I?m not wearing my pants anymore. I?m wearing a white nightgown that I think is silk. The girl might still be talking, but I can?t focus on anything but the glimmering fabric until there?s a knock on the door. I look to the door and then back at the girl. Her face is whiter than the silk. ?Who did you invite?? she asks. At the second knock, she runs upstairs, and now I?m the stupid one heading towards a door. It opens before I can reach the handle, and my mother is at the threshold. She?s young now, like she used to be.
?Mom,? I say, ?I?v found a new daughter for you.? She enters like she doesn?t see me and walks up the stairs. I follow her into a familiar hallway. She opens the door to a bedroom that looks just like my childhood bedroom, down to the hermit crab aquarium. They?re still there, although I?ve forgotten their names. She walks to the side of the bed where the girl is pretending to be asleep. I?m obviously suffering some sort of break from reality, because I?m watching my own memory. I remember the hot stink of iron on my mother?s breath and the two words that she?s about to say.
?Old religion.?
Like most of my friends growing up, I was Roman Catholic, but, while they slept warm in their beds, I was just Roman. The old religion, as we practiced it, mostly consisted of sacrificing animals and inspecting their livers. The Romans learned this form of divination from the Etruscans, and I consider myself lucky not to know who taught them. The Romans called it ?haruspicium,? literally ?gut watching.? The girl, now wearing an old pair of flannel pajamas that I used to own, rises from her bed at my mother?s behest, and I wonder if she already knows what?s going to happen in the basement.
In popular media, there?s always an elder vampire whose powers have been developed over the centuries or millennia until he?s one of the most powerful beings on the earth. That?s not how it works. The contradiction through the heart of vampirism has always been seduction without sex. Vampires are sterile, but their looks mock fertility until the decay works its way to the outside. Quite a few medical professionals have been turned in recent years, and mistitled and password-protected files containing videos of vampire autopsies that show exactly what the disease will do to an ovary or a testicle can be found online. That?s why I haven?t let my mother turn me yet. I?m going to have a baby first, just as she waited to have me.
We keep grandmother in an open grave in the basement. I don?t know if she?s actually my grandmother. My mother introduces her the same way to all the recently-turned women in our area as a sort of initiation and primer on the dangers of longevity. I try not to think that somewhere nearby in another basement is her male counterpart.
With a few exceptions?like hair?, humans have at most two of any body part, left and right. All the beauty judiciously allotted to Eve is overflowing and rancid in grandmother. Odd and asymmetrical nibs, nubs, sacs, ridges, curves, and clefts braid themselves flesh-over-flesh in an unending dress rehearsal of primary and secondary sex characteristics. At this point, I don?t know which end started out as her head and which her feet. Only her eyes have kept their beauty while increasing their number, her glancing, belle-of-the-ball eyes. They?re blue, a blue from wherever the sky meets the sea. I?ve tried to count the stars of that obscene constellation.
I follow my mother and the girl down to the basement. There?s a sheep in the pen. I never felt that bad about the sacrifice. It?s done as quickly as possible, and I love lamb chops with mint jelly, but the way that grandmother giggled like a schoolgirl always unnerved me. The same fear that never left me is in the other Maria now. I don?t know if she can hear me, but go to her side to whisper in her ear the verse from the other religion that helped me to make sense of things when I felt trapped down here wishing for a friend who understood. ?The Lord trieth the just and the wicked: but he that loveth iniquity hateth his own soul.? Grandmother stops giggling for a moment, and her lines of sight converge on me.
The sacrifice finishes, and mother begins to disembowel. She removes the liver and looks at it for a long time without saying anything. This isn?t a memory anymore. This never happened. She should be showing Maria how to read the organ. Mother turns to me. She?s old again, like she should be. ?Mom,? I say, ?I?ve found a new daughter for you.?
She walks back up the stairs and I follow her out of the basement to the front door. ?Kill it,? she commands. She opens the door and leaves, but I can?t see where she?s gone. It looks like the world continues, but my vision ends a few feet from the threshold.
?You left me down there,? it says. ?You tried to give me to your mother. What did I do to deserve growing up to be you??
?I ask myself the same question,? I admit. There?s no tighter bond of intimacy than injustice.
?Take look at the fridge if you want to know.?
The pictures on the refrigerator are of a different family now, my family. A hole in the shape of a man has been cut out of each one, but I?m there, and so is our daughter. I?m beaming; teeth that only my dentist has seen before are showing, and she has my smile. In one of the pictures, I?m reading her a bedtime story in my old bedroom upstairs.
In the bedroom, I throw the covers off the bed. There?s nothing under them but two vials. There?s a viscous, jaundiced cream in one and once-a-month red in the other. I pour the liquids onto the bed and try to mix them with my hands, but the egg?s cracked, and the tails long stilled. ?I wish I had a daughter!?
?You can?t make wishes for other people.? When I?m done, I compose myself and rise from the side of the bed. There?s a mirror across from me, and I wipe my bloody hands across the front of the nightgown. ?Maybe you didn?t get anything for selling your soul because you?re worthless.? Her voice sounds different. Her fangs are coming in.
?Let?s go back home,? I say. ?I?ll take care of you.?
?It?s not my house, and, even if it was, you have to be invited back in after you turn, right? Even if you lived there before you turned??
?That?s true, but you saw what happened in the basement. Something told my mother that I was there. That something is in the house that we came from, too. We can ask it to let you back in.?
?How will we know if it agrees??
I pollute the aquarium with my hand and pull a hermit crab out. I remember its name now, Sheldon. That?s clever. I wonder if I thought of that. I pull it out of its eponymous shell, place it on the desk, and get the letter opener out of the drawer. I?m quick; Sheldon didn?t feel a thing. I poke around at his entrails. ?It?s okay,? I tell Maria. ?I read its liver. You?re invited.? I?m grabbing a sheet and handing it to her in the doorway before she can respond.
?I?m scared,? she says.
?Don?t be.? I put my hands on hers and raise the blanket with her. I lied. Crustaceans don?t have livers. When the blanket falls, the hallway is covered in once-in-a-lifetime white, the white of moonlit ice on Christmas Eve. It must have been a vampire, otherwise it wouldn?t have burst. It must have been something else, otherwise it would have bust blood, not snow.
I walk downstairs. There?s no tree, but one of the presents from the other house has followed me. I read the tag.
?To: Maria
From: Maria?
I open the present. There?s a crab inside, and the pattern on its shell looks like a face that I?d recognize anywhere: the queen of clubs. That was my card! I lift her up and press her forehead to mine. Three things pop into my mind. ?A vampire, a genie, and thine own soul.?
I already know that the question is ?Whom do you hate?? but I go to the bloody kitchen to get a knife fit for a queen.
There?s an origami liver inside the bisected crab. I unfold it. The liver reads, ?Who was she??


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