Sfumato

By Kat Thomas

Twilight for smart people. The story of Mr. Glass, a lonely art lover who just happens to be a 1,000-year-old vampire, searching for a reason to believe the impossible, that God truly exists. A supernatural combination of Silas Marner and the End of the Affair.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kat Thomas
• Release date: Aug 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476233086

Kat Thomas

A popular word for describing Kat Thomas is Renaissance Woman (which just means Kat’s lucky enough to be blessed with the belief she can do anything that she puts her mind to). A Storyteller: she’s written an existential vampire novel, comedy screenplay set in a pyramid scheme, and a screwball comedy screenplay set on the world's longest international flight. A Comedian: having studied Long Form Improv and Sketch Comedy at IO West and UCB. An Artist: ink, charcoal, & photography. A Burlesque Dancer and producer with the Internet channel Workin' The Tease! At the moment Kat is working on this awesome awesome blog (which she's been doing for 4 years), a sitcom about the Weed Industry, a comedy screenplay about DUIs, and trying to someday get sleep more....

Book preview

Book One

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But, those that it will not break, it kills. It kills the very good, and the very gentle, and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry. --Hemingway

Chapter One

Outsider Art – noun - (aut-‘si-dər ərt) 1. A termed coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for Art Brut (which literally translates as Raw Art or Rough Art), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; focusing particularly on art by insane asylum inmates.

Daisy… I exhaled.

I knelt down next to my life, softly stroking her chestnut locks.

Come on let’s get her head up Mr. Glass, Augie pragmatically said. Gingerly I cradled her head upright.

And then I saw it. The spot that was turning Daisy’s dress from white to pink.

Oh god, the blood. The blood. The blood.

Chapter Two

Pieta – noun - (pee-ey-tah) 1. A representation of the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of the dead Christ, usually shown held on her lap.

The dirty solitary tile bathed in sunlight. The tinkling laugh that contains the sucker promise, for most, of fornication. The smile of Daisy. You, human that you are, may think later that I focus on details too much. But when my only long term standing relationship is with my memories, details are all I have.

But that is not now. That is the end. This is the beginning.

Chapter Three

Negative Space – noun - (ne-gə-tiv spās) 1. Empty space in an artwork, a void.

In 1610, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio died. At the point of death he was thirty-nine, and a complete failure. A brilliant artist, something that your nitwit of a century has only just rediscovered, he was also a convicted murderer.

In Rome Caravaggio had mortally stabbed a man in a duel, all over a measly bet on a tennis game. A seasoned veteran of the underbelly of life, this was not Caravaggio’s first entanglement with the law. He had the reputation to be associated with quarrels, brawls, and assaults. He had been prosecuted for tossing a plate of artichokes at a most unlucky waiter. This had all resulted in being jailed, frequently. It had gotten so bad, that he always slept fully clothed with a dagger by his side for necessary protection.

Caravaggio had been one of the most renowned, and heftily paid, Roman painters. But one disaster after another had caused his genius to be eclipsed by his catastrophe of a life. He fled his sentence conviction for the southern climate of Naples and Sicily. After four years in exile he had created a series of paintings, bribery for the patrons of Rome who had vainly attempted to gain a pardon for this train wreck of an artist.

Caravaggio had hope. He had finally received word he could return to his homeland and set sail for Rome. But in a Tuscan port of Palo his small ship was detained. There he was, ironically, mistaken for another low life degenerate and was seized for questioning. While in jail the tide turned, for the worse. Caravaggio’s ship sailed with his collection of paintings, and not him. Two days later he was released from prison, an innocent man who was now infected with a deadly case of malaria.

Desperate, Caravaggio decided to chase after his precious paintings, canvases he needed for the men on high who wielded the power. Delirious in the blistering heat of summer, Caravaggio treaded the scalding beaches of Italy fervently trying to catch something that was physically impossible. The farthest he got was the Port’Ercole where he collapsed and died a lonely miserable death in an infirmary run by the clergy of San Sebastino.

Caravaggio’s life was a series of bad timing, bad judgment, and straight up bad luck, but he did create turbulent paintings full of contrasting brightness and darkness. Personally, I am more of a fan of the subtly of Da Vinci, give me his sfumato over Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro any day of the week, but regardless the man was a genius. Despite Caravaggio’s pathetic life story the man created works of art that were revered throughout the world during his lifetime, and once again in this century after being completely forgotten for four hundred years. He created truly great art, a perfect window into the pure emotion of humanity.

So what have you, sitting in your cubicle coma, done?

That is right: diddly squat.

But you are not alone. Everyone hits a point in their life where potential becomes an ugly word. When the person you could have been shrinks into a mirage of evaporating ambition and fading prophecy.

It does not matter your professional aspirations. You could wish to be a movie star, an astronaut, or the president of whatever puffed up country you reside in. And then one day you wake up and you are a real estate agent, a chemistry teacher, or just a loser that ran for the school board and lost.

It is the sickness to which everyone feigns immunity. I am invincible, you think. All of my dreams will come true. And then one day you wake up and discover you are ordinary. Hacking your lungs up with the black plague of mediocrity.

But this is not the story of your pathetic life; it is the story of mine. Or lack thereof.

I too believed I was inoculated, that I was to be known. I was to live my existence with a ferocity whose only response would be cowering before my very might. I was to be an ubermench; and not the Man of Tomorrow comic, you witless clam of a reader. But unlike your meager moments of self-examination, it took me a millennium of toiling to get to this realization.

Let us breeze by that last statement, as you probably do me every day. Nothing unordinary about me. You walk right by. Nicely dressed, but indistinguishable. Tall, but not too tall. If you took a second glance, which you never have a reason to do, you might note a head that is too large for its thin torso, the receding hairline helps in aiding this realization. But if you were to stare harder, which we all know is not polite, you might note that I do not smile.

But what if I were to smile? It has been awhile, quite awhile, but stranger things have happened. Chances are it would be of the cocktail party variety smile, polite yet comfortable, always in control. Never would it be one of those Perma smiles, one of those grins that starts at your mouth and invades your whole face until your eyes are shining like the once visible Milky Way. But for sake of argument let us say I did smile this of utter happiness.

If perchance my lips were to part into a real smile of actual joy you might note my Left Canine tooth. Now this Left Canine is a perfectly average humanoid tooth, but after a moment more your eyes would be compelled to trail across to my Left Lateral Incisor. Said optics would then continue across the veneer of my mouth, skipping past my two Central Incisors, over the Right Lateral Incisor, before landing on my Right Canine.

Funny, you would think, I have never found beauty in a tooth before, but there is something intoxicating about that Right Canine. There is something primal about that tooth, you would think, sharp to the point of almost being fanglike. With no regards of those social cocktail niceties you would lean over trying to get a closer look at that tooth, at its savagery.

But I do not smile. The mouth remains closed for business. You see nothing.

Pay attention because, since I am not a fan of Supernatural labels, I really I am only going to say this once: Vrykolakes. Katakhanoso. Upiry. Blutsauger. Damned. Bogeyman. Blooksucker. Undead. Nosfereteu. Vampire.

I can hear your mind right now. I can hear it whispering through your little peepers as they hover above theses riptide like words. A monster, you think, but monsters do not exist. That is right, you are sensible. You are a grown up who has cast aside childlike beliefs for the cold predictability of rational reality. It is a good story that you believe most of the time; but I bet you, Doubting Thomas that you are, are asserting this statement with a tad less certainty than you care to admit. And perhaps, if you were alone, and did not have to worry about losing said rational face, you glanced over your shoulder, just once to make sure.

Yes, Virginia, there are monsters. Although we prefer the title non-Fatal, monster with its negative connotations is just so anti-PC. Not that there is a huge constituency these days, we are nothing if not candidates for the endangered species list. It is simple: nobody else believes in us. It is not only Tinkerbell who fades out of being without faith.

Think about that for a moment. It is as if a rock stood in the middle of a town. The square was established around it. Everyone knew the rock: they named it, drove their cars around it, maybe high school students graffiti-ed it the day before they were to matriculate. The rock’s existence was unquestionable.

And then it was not. Over time people stopped noticing the rock. They were too busy to trifle with such matters. It became something only mentioned to the very young and the very gullible. And then one day there was no rock, because the people could drive right through it. It simply ceased to exist.

I am the rock, or rather the lost potential of the Stonehenge that rock could have been.

It is a sad existence, one that has a complete lack of recognition.

But, I do not seek your puny pity. You should still fear me. Sure my Right Canine does not drain to dry, but the result is always an untimely end. Not enough for most to notice, but enough to satiate the hunger, and do its job.

Sadly the only person other than yours truly that sees my craftsmanship is the morgue attendant, and even then it is anonymous. Usually my official classification is unexplained illness. My credit is stolen away by a sniveling weak-chinned pudgy man who spends his nights with stiffs wondering why smoking hot Cathi, note the i not the y, down the hall, you know the one with big tits, will not even smile at him. But, even if he were to recognize my handiwork, could you imagine the audacity of a medical examiner claiming that the deceased was killed by a parasitical Supernatural? There is no little box to check on the sheet for that one.

Sometimes they try to be creative with an investigation, usually not; there is never for a budget for that sort of thing except on television shows. Instead I am mostly labeled as heart disease, of the ambiguous kind. Elusive. Indefinite. Undefined. Inexplicable. Uncertain. Unexplained. Usually but I recently received my most patronizing insult to date: West Nile, a bug bite.

If there was ever a moment in existence where I wished for my Left Canine to match my Right Canine, this is it. A bug bite! As if I was an insect, a vermin that you dismissively wave away with your hand as it buzzes around anonymously. An infestation lacking any moment of contemplative thought. An insect has no flair for the creative; it has no flair for anything because it does not think. It just lives its short useless life and then dies. And nothing mourns it. Not even other insects.

Okay, I am sure by now you have so many questions. You might want to know if all the stories and legends are true? You might want to know where my other tooth is? You might want to know of my life before? Or how my cherry was popped, how I happened into my profession? So do I.

Pardon me, now I feel I should correct myself. I do believe that I misspoke before. To say people do not believe in me is slightly erroneous. They do not believe in me until the moment of contact. But even then there is the slightest suggestion of disbelief. As if maybe I am a dream, a hallucination that is not to be accepted. Should they trust their primal fear, or rationalize me away like Santa Claus? But those questions drain away as the moment of contact is replaced with an even more important moment: the moment when they realize that they are going to die.

Then they can most definitely be made to believe. A moment I completely savor. It is a sweetest of revenges against my marginalization. And this would have been my existence. Tiny bubbles of fury followed by painfully endless epochs of being on the periphery.

But what had always been was to change. And by chance or fate, the catalyst for change is not some huge moment, as it always is not, but a series of minute moments that somehow always seem to break that proverbial camel’s back.

There was a straw and his name was Steve.

I usually do not talk to my prey. I am not self pornographic. Do not call me a cat; frankly, I do not pleasure myself with taunting.

I am direct. It is a job, for better or worse, my job.

As always, I do it quick and clean. Gore is so unbecoming. God, how I hate blood. Sanguinity is a byproduct of my livelihood, but not one that I embrace. I do not believe in chaotic venesection. I hate how humans they become so messy when injured, oozing about. It is also so untidy.

I can be savage, but it is always cleanly savagery. No reason to soil the clothes, dry cleaning being so expensive these days. What is it they say: cleanliness is next to God?

If I am impulsively trolling for a late night nosh, something I rarely attempt nowadays, I am patient. I wait for my moment. You know the mise-en-scene: dark alleyway, unlit hallway, or a moonless sky. Here is where your beloved cinema got it right.

I enter the scene and I execute. Most of the time my mind is on something else. A book I just read, a Ken Burns documentary I recently watched, or did I leave lights on at my suburban home? That is the thing: if you have done the same job for almost eleven hundred years you can do it with your eyes closed.

Once upon a time people did realize, and accepted. Curving into my body like a lover who had resisted long enough. Oh yes, I know how this story ends. Accepting their fate like sheep treading towards the slaughterhouse, embracing the hopeless surrender.

But there was none of that in the eyes of Steve as he diddled his pornographic phone while waiting the last train of the night at one T station. He pushed away at his toy as I approached his left flank. As my mouth reached for his luscious neck, nestled between a navy colored Peacoat and a Crimson colored collegiate scarf, I hesitated a moment.

By this time Steve actually felt the need to engage himself in his life. He tore his optics away from the text message he had just written declaring that the party he had just left was nothing but a sausage fest and two girls he had already hit, and into my line of sight.

I have to admit, there was something about Steve: a void in his eyes. A dullness that could not comprehend even the most basic functions of humanity. They gleamed back with the fogginess of someone who had gotten laid early in life and never looked back.

Intellectuals will always argue that their generation is the decline of civilization. That everything in the past was peachy academic keen in a utopic world where everyone was a smarty-pants.

And I, social archeologist that I am, am here to proclaim that is not the case. The majority of the world is made up of dumb people who have snippets of enlightenment, if they are lucky, but who pass them aside for moments of happiness. Because, as hopefully you with your attempted stabs at elucidation will know, the two are as different as darkness and illumination. And though I have seen many a blank stare in my time there was something about Steve’s opacity.

I will never be completely sure why I did it. Perhaps I wanted some validation, someone to recognize me. Perhaps I was just bored with the status quo. Whatever the reason I did something that I had not done since my amateur days when I still had a flair for the dramatic. Do you know who I am? I asked him.

And he raised his eyes for a split second, scoffed with dismissive stagnation, and returned to thumbing his phone before absently committing to a reply, You’re nobody, just another loser.

Steven missed it, as he had many things in his life, but I replied. Silently I gave a rebuttal to this statement as the corners of my mouth slowly rose up blooming into an angry smile. I made my move.

His death was nothing exciting. And neither was the few hours afterwards.

But some words creep. They do not hit upon impact, but hover above your head in a halo of dirty delayed sickness. And then one day these floating atomic bombs, orbiting around you like one of the many moons of Pluto, is inhaled. Radioactive particles that with unconscious invisible breaths kill you, and everyone you love. If you, simple human that you are, can actually fathom what love is. These said words methodically tunnel deep into your lungs, taking on a weight that was never experienced upon detonation. They burrow and metastasize, until finally they find their emotional crypt, lying in your heart like a piece of lead at the bottom of a lake.

You are nobody, just another loser.

Chapter Four

Crepuscular – adjective - (kri-pəs-kyə-lər) 1. Of, relating to, or like twilight. Or, dim; indistinct; glimmering; imperfectly luminous; obscure.

And so I came to bring this up at the meeting.

I am a social hermit save one night a week. The meeting is nothing formal, just some underworld beings getting together in a rented basement apartment to hang out on a weekend night. Unofficially we call it the Friday Night Killer Club, a misnomer if there ever was one. Mainly we commiserate on the forgotten crack of hell we seem to have fallen into. Call it AA for monstrosities.

There is a Larry. Not his real name, Larry is a hater. Self-loathing looks terrible on humans, worse on a 3,000 year-old Mesopotamian mummy. He has given up on it all. Figures it is better just to hide. All he is on this planet is a joke. More so than any other non-Fatal he is unable to drum up a shred of fear. But Larry does not want to be scary. He just wants to have a 9 to 5, a mortgage and a wife. It is pathetic, but who Larry really wants to be is Steve.

And Lobo: he is partial to full moons, hates silver bullets, and ladies he is an animal in the sack. So what if his reputation is more of a lecherous hand than casting a long dark shadow of fear. With his shaggy long hair and requiring the services of a good orthodontist, people see him as more aging rocker than the devil’s minion. He is the guy at the bar hitting on girls that he could only get in his glory days, a point that he purposely overlooks in a mist of self-medicating cannabis.

And then there is Jerry. Yeah, that is his real name. Blessed with intelligence to the point of being a hubristic curse and totally tactless. Jerry is a lawyer.

Hey, every team has to have a mascot.

We are the ghosts of monster middle management. Once upon a time we hoped for better; now we just want to be allowed to settle into the dust of whatever. An effigy to the gravitational pull of downward mobility.

And what happens at these meetings of the past rulers of the realms of fear? We usually play pinball or air hockey, and talk about the good old days; not that they were even that great for this lot. For a while we had a ping-pong table but Jerry was always arguing that we were cheating when he was losing a game. It got to be such an annoyance that Larry secretly called the Salvation Army and donated the table to avoid further altercations. Someday, we delude ourselves, we will wrestle up the enthusiasm to go out for a slay. And yet, it never happens.

It was there on an idle Friday night, that Steve’s last words were strategically mentioned.

He called me a loser, I kvetched to my fellow geldings. I had to wait the proper time before interjecting in my malmots. In my premeditation I hoped to conceal the cancer that had nestled inside of me.

You’re not a loser, Larry automatically affirmed, as much for my benefit as for his own. If I am a loser what does that make Larry?

"But to this shilly-shally of human I was. A smelly silly Fatal. He referred to me as a loser. If only he could