I know what I am before what I am has a name. If I reveal too much up front, then you will know what that name is before you are ready to assimilate the repercussions of meeting somebody owning such a name. And, then, you may not stay to meet me.

Where did we meet? Don’t you remember? I suppose, remembering is not really relevant, because we haven’t yet met. Well, to make things easy, think of a coastline not outside a radius of seven miles from here, then, oh yes, a rundown hotel situated at the rough end of the promenade, as far from the pier as it is possible to be without leaving town. People who stay there listen to the sea at night, begging its soporific ways to lull them into a false sense of security: whilst knowing it’s false somehow makes it seem more real, because, at the bottom of your heart, you know that there are only false things in life, including, even, the self itself.

Despite the hotel’s distance from the main tourist enclaves, there is an electric advertisement hoarding which pulses a glow to and from your bedroom. In shades of red and blue. But mostly red. This strictly alternate illumination partially irritates you with the shape of the room’s ill-decor: the dull brown-greens of the blistered wallpaper, the devil-shaped knotwood of the wardrobe door, the islands of linoleum and the snaggly bed-quilt. They thus blend in with half the night, if not continuously. Hence, only a partial irritation as you stare waking in the pulsing eye.

Now, you’re here, it’s time to reveal my self if not, quite yet, my name. It’s too late for you to leave the hotel, because it’s safer in here with me than walking out along the rough side of the dark sea-end where things roam that do not even have names at all.

I can see that your gossamer nightgear, whence the bedquilt slips down like waves of cotton pores, is teasingly more beautiful than bareness. Do you mind if I touch you all over? Touch is far more sensitive than sight, especially during half the night. Let me lower the bedquilt further. Ah, the dunes of your lower limbs cascade with half-seethrough silky satiny lace.

Let’s now ease off the teasing lace. There’s no point in screaming, since I am deaf. Didn’t I tell you? Somebodies like me cannot hear. Cannot speak. Cannot smell. My sole harmonic is with reflection – that very same reflection which my body traditionally cannot make. And such harmonic means, of course, that I can see and touch – but only like glass.

Is that why you shivered when I first set my eyes upon your eyes first setting upon me? And as I fondle your upper parts, is that why your shiver becomes a shudder? But not exactly a shudder. Too violent for that name. More a body-jack.

That accounts for half the night. The rest, which rests in the utter impenetrability of the pulse’s other side, we switch roles, and it’s you fondling me with your icy glass fingers. Reversed. Me your upper parts. You my lower. Then we change tack. You my upper. Me your lower. Time to feel. Then time to be felt. As if each pulse is its own mirror image. Naturally, foreplay wears thin after a while. During my share of the night, my own breasts feel like balloons of blood, ready to burst rather than backfire embolisms into the circuit. I need them milked.

And you take a soft suck from the left, then right. It’s tantamount to the Platonic Form of sensuality made incarnate. Your mouth is soft and warm because its teeth have taken on its glass touch.

Then, at the split second of the pulse’s turn, I take suck from you, from right, then left, sending the undiluted curds of crude blood to the refinery of my soul.

At the end of this process of delight, we kiss properly, icy tongue to warm tongue, and versa vice, where communication is passion not words. The only way to talk.

So, you see, my dear, if I’d come out earlier with my name, you would have missed my visit. I can now reveal it, before I leave you to some shop-soiled holiday romance by the sea. Remember me. Remember me forever. Remember your sweet Ona, Vampire of half the night.

DF Lewis