Phthinoporon

Jess felt like a corpse on the late night bus back from Organic Chemistry, and he was sure that he looked enough like one that somebody would've reported his body to the police, had anyone been around to care. As it was, the only other people on the bus were the driver and one other passenger sitting two rows in front of him.

He stared, unblinking, at the laptop perched on his knees, but while he was supposedly putting the finishing touches on his research paper due the next morning, in truth, he could barely even parse the words on the screen. Had he really just typed the same sentence on sickle cell anemia three times?

Frustrated, he slammed his laptop shut and zipped his backpack open to pack it away, resigning himself to making frantic edits early the next morning.

He still felt restless and jittery, though, not having yet crashed from his five cups of coffee, and his hands almost moved on their own, unzipping the small front pocket of his backpack.

He pulled out a graphite pencil and a little black notebook.

In high school, he had carried this Moleskine around everywhere, in case he ever saw something that inspired him to sketch, something worth looking at closely, over and over again.

He hadn’t sketched anything since college started.

He opened the notebook to the first blank page and then fixed his gaze on the other passenger.

He was a brunet. Pale, with sunken-in cheeks. His nose was crooked, and his glasses sat unevenly on his face.

Jess looked down at his lap and saw that he had already started to sketch out the hard line of the stranger’s jaw, the long slope of his neck.

He hated it. He hated the way that these lines, these forms, flowed easily out of his hands in a way that two-thousand words on hematologic disorders just didn't.

In high school, he had never imagined that he’d major in biochemistry, that he would move across the country to a city where nobody knew him just to attend a school with a good pre-med program.

Not until the week before his senior year of high school, when he’d finally killed his dream of a career in art with the realization that it would've been impossible for someone that wasn’t even that good at it.

So what? He had believed a lot of stupid shit when he was younger. He had been convinced that his neighbor was a vampire for five years.

The stranger yawned, and Jess could see that his canines were longer than the rest of his teeth. Interesting. After he finished shading the eyes, he made sure to sketch those out, too.

---

His hands still felt restless after submitting his paper the next morning, and he couldn’t blame it on coffee.

He reopened his notebook to the sketch of the stranger on the bus, stared at it, and decided that he needed to put colors to it, while the image of it was still vivid in his mind.

A week ago, his mother had shipped him a box of his painting supplies—his set of semi-used acrylic paints, his nearly frayed brushes, his value pack of stretched canvas—even after he’d insisted that he wouldn’t need them.

He sorted through the paints for the right colors—warm tones, like the autumn leaves on the tree outside his window. There was the light brown of the stranger’s hair, the yellow glow from the streetlamps on his skin, the bright red mark on the bridge of his nose from an ill-fitting nose pad when he’d taken off his glasses...

When the painting was finished, he had the bitter realization that it was the only thing he had created since starting college that was any good, research papers and lab reports notwithstanding.

He was tempted to call it fate when he later saw an open call for a campus art show. But that would’ve implied that there was some cosmic significance behind his decision to submit the painting beyond an idle whim and the ‘FREE FOOD’ prominently advertised on the poster.

---

After having his fill of charcuterie and sangria, Jess had almost convinced himself that he’d gotten everything he’d wanted out of the art show. Near the end of the night, the organizer approached him and asked how much he wanted for his painting.

"What?"

"Your painting,” Grace repeated. “Phthinoporon. An anonymous buyer is interested.”

Anonymous. It had to be a joke. Nobody knew him here. Nobody else had even asked him about the painting all night. It made sense. It might've been good by his standards, but it was mediocre compared to the other pieces displayed.

“It’s twenty-thousand dollars,” he joked, suddenly feeling a burst of nihilism, “It’s always been my dream to get rich off of my art. Tell them not to bother otherwise.”

Three days later, Jess saw that twenty-thousand dollars had been deposited into his checking account.

“Grace, there’s been a terrible mistake,” he said immediately after she answered her phone. “I don’t think checking account balances can have that many digits.”

But she insisted that no, someone had bought his painting for the full asking price, and then he felt unmoored, unsure how to navigate this new reality where he was flush with disposable income.

Did whoever bought the painting confuse him with another, much more famous artist? Or did they think he was a penniless waif that they were rescuing with some grand act of charity?

He maintained the possibility that he was experiencing a vivid hallucination induced by malnutrition and lack of sleep. That was why he resolutely did not think about how he had always wanted to try oil painting but could never afford the supplies for it.

While Jess continued to avoid thinking about the smooth way that oil colors blended together on the bus that evening, someone sat down in the empty seat next to him, despite the abundance of empty seats elsewhere.

He turned around, and it was him. Phthinoporon himself.

“Hello,” he said, smiling shyly at him. “You’re Jess, right? Jess Harker?"

"...Yes," Jess replied warily. “I’m sorry, have we met before?”

"No, not exactly. I’m Aidan. I, uh, saw you at the art show a few days ago.”

Dread settled into his stomach. “You were there?” He hadn’t even noticed.

“I was! And, uh, I wanted to thank you. For the painting.”

The painting. He had seen the painting.

“Th-Thank me?”

“Yes! It’s amazing. It’s… It’s hanging up in my room right now.”

Jess burned hot with shame. God, he was a fucking creep.

He had studied the face of this stranger without his knowledge, without his consent, had probably mangled it with his clumsy brushstrokes, and now Aidan had seen the evidence of it and was mocking him with it.

Aidan must have felt exposed, like he'd been cut open and had everything bleed out.

How could he have not? That was how Jess felt now, just with the intense way that Aidan was staring at him. Like he was something worth looking at closely, over and over again.

And then Aidan blushed, bright red, and said, “You were meant to be an artist.”

Jess almost broke his fingers slamming them against the yellow push tape on the wall.

The rear doors swung open. He ran out.

‘No,’ he told himself. ‘That isn’t me.’

Jess had been lucky to have been assigned a single dorm room for the semester. When he returned to it in the dead of night, it was dark and quiet and empty, and he didn’t have the energy to make it any different.

It felt like walking into his own tomb.

---

“Well, this is a coincidence,” Jess observed when he entered the only nearby coffee shop open past midnight and was greeted by the sight of Aidan sitting at a table, sipping a dark red drink.

"Or fate," Aidan replied.

Jess hummed noncommittally.

“I just came in to use the restroom, anyway,” he muttered before he did an Olympic-level sprint toward the back of the shop.

He hoped that he would be able to camp out in the restroom for the next hour or so until Aidan eventually left, but those hopes were dashed when Aidan walked into the restroom after him.

"Look,” he started, and Jess silently thanked every deity that they were the only two in the room. “I’m sorry that I put you on the spot on the bus, but you don't need to be embarrassed. I don't mind that you painted me. I like it, actually. I—“ He licked his lips. “I really do love that painting."

Jess shook his head. "I don’t understand. I’d get it if it was because you’re some conceited rich boy and it's a painting of you, but even then… There's no way that it's worth twenty-thousand dollars. It's not even worth a hundredth of that."

"It is. I think so."

"Why?"

Aidan took a deep breath and seemed to brace himself, clenching his hands into fists and straightening his shoulders. Slowly, he turned his head to the side, toward the restroom mirror.

Jess followed his gaze and then watched his jaw drop open in shock at the reflection of himself standing by the sinks. Alone.

"You… You're…"

"A vampire," Aidan finished sheepishly, as if he were confessing to something mildly embarrassing like being a theatre kid, instead of the most incredible thing that Jess had ever heard.

He made a strangled noise at the back of his throat, and Aidan started to panic.

“Please don’t freak out!” he begged, holding his hands out, “I’m not going to… to bite you, or lock you in a castle, or watch you sleep, or whatever else you think vampires do. I just… want you to understand.”

Jess didn’t understand anything anymore, but he calmed down enough for Aidan to continue.

"I was born like this, so I’ve never been able to see my reflection. I mean, I do know what I look like. I still show up in photographs. But I never let people take my picture. Because I hate how I look. I look like... a corpse. I could go an entire century and never want to look at myself.

“But then I saw your painting. And... I think I get it now. What my parents, my friends… what some people see, when they look at me.”

Eventually, Jess said, “Yeah. I think I get it now, too.”

Aidan grinned at him then, his canine teeth long and sharp.

There was a part of Jess that was still waiting for Aidan to admit that it was all bullshit, that everything had been a cruel joke designed to trick him into thinking that vampires existed, that he could create art worth thousands of dollars, and other impossible things.

And yet, that part of him couldn’t quite quash down the rising feeling of giddiness in his chest, couldn’t make the restless energy thrumming through his hands and fingers die out.

He drank in the bright, earnest look in Aidan’s eyes, and for the first time since the week before his senior year of high school, he allowed himself to believe in impossible things.

---

Jess did buy himself a set of oil paints, eventually, along with a set of oil paint brushes, a palette, linseed oil, turpentine, an easel—

“My mom is a sculpture professor in the art department,” Aidan said once they walked out of the art supply store, minutes before closing. “She has connections. I’m sure that she’d love to recommend some good oil painting classes for you. What do you think?”

Jess thought that if his hands weren’t full of shopping bags, he would’ve sketched the way the autumn leaves looked strewn across the sidewalk. He thought about how it would look recreated in oil paints. He thought about Aidan, and about himself. He thought about how even dead things could still be bright and full of color.