Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,57

of Turk’s art pieces, pulled off the Web.

“It is the threat of art.”

We were working so well together it was like we were all one thing—me, Pestilence, the computer, the work we were doing. I felt like I was flying.

And when my mom knocked on the door and asked if my friend was staying for dinner, I automatically said, “Sure.”

Then I said, “Can you?”

And Pestilence said, “Thanks, yeah. I think I should. We still have to do your podcast.”

I was sure Mom and Dad would figure Pestilence was a little weird. After all, she was a little weird. But there was only one truly weird thing that night: Pestilence and Mom hit it off right away.

“I want to hear all about your poetry,” Mom said. “I wrote a lot when I was in college.”

My mother wrote poetry? How come she never told me?

“Why did you stop?” Pestilence wanted to know.

“My inspiration was Sylvia Plath. Like a lot of young women then. I’m afraid I wasn’t very original. And when I got married and had Cody—my life just seemed so pleasant, I felt like a fraud writing all that dark stuff.”

“Sylvia Plath had a husband and children,” Pestilence said. “She stayed dark. Very dark.”

“That’s true,” Mom said, and leaned forward with her chin on her hand. “Who inspires you?”

“I feel, like, a spiritual affinity for the Anglo-Saxon poets,” Pestilence said. “But I wouldn’t say they inspire me. It’s just that they understood fate.”

Dad turned his wineglass in his hand and said, “Give us something.”

Pestilence stood up and shouted:

Still life.

That’s what they call it.

Slice of life.

An old Dutch painting.

Tulips dead four hundred years.

A vase that broke when a bomb blew up the museum it was in

Back in World War II.

And crawling across the rotted table a bug that didn’t live through winter.

Slice of life?

Slice of death.

“Not bad,” Dad said.

“I can see why you like the Anglo-Saxons,” Mom said.

“It’s like having our own gleeman,” Dad said. “Or glee-woman, I guess.”

“What’s a gleeman?” I said.

“A poet hired to entertain the dinner guests in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall,” Dad said.

I looked at Dad in surprise. I wasn’t used to him knowing things except law stuff.

“I married her.” Dad shrugged and cocked his head toward Mom. “It’s been educational.”

“Just a minute, please.” Mom smiled and ducked her head. “I’ll be right back.”

She got up and almost ran up the stairs.

“Have you read the Burton Raffel translation of Beowulf?” Pestilence asked Dad. “He was also a lawyer, I think, before he switched to poetry.”

Pestilence and Dad launched into this whole thing about Beowulf, and whether the dragon is Beowulf’s own unacknowledged fear and whether the Anglo-Saxon warriors are the modern intellect, and a whole lot of other stuff I must have been absent for the day they taught it in school.

“Those Saxons are just like lawyers,” Dad said, sounding excited. “Greedy, conscienceless, out for loot. Beowulf and Elliot, attorneys at law.”

“You probably know the word attorney is literally ‘attorney’—at tournament,” Pestilence said. “It goes back to the times when you hired a mercenary to fight for you in trial by combat.”

“Hasn’t changed,” Dad said. “When I go into the courtroom—”

They stopped when Mom walked in.

She was carrying some worn black notebooks, and she had a shy smile on her face.

“Some of my old things,” she said.

“Read us something,” Pestilence said.

Mom flipped open one of the notebooks and said, “Oh, this is really bad. But I was so proud of it when I wrote it.”

The lonely trees are still and stark.

The death-cloak snow lies on the ground.

The pallid sun goes down to dark

And silence is the only sound.

My heart has wandered from this home

And found no better sky or earth,

So I return to it alone,

Contented with my share of dearth.

“‘Death-cloak snow,’” Pestilence said. “I wish I’d thought of that.”

I wished I’d never heard it. It was embarrassing, like walking in on Mom and Dad kissing. I was hoping we’d change the subject, but Mom and Pestilence were on a roll. First Pestilence recited a poem, then Mom did one of hers. Then they’d say something like “That broken window is a good image,” or “I really like the assonance in that last line.”

They went on like that for an hour, with Dad paying attention to every word, and me hoping they’d run out of them.

But when it was over, I’d never seen my mom so happy. No, that wasn’t it. I’d never seen her happy in the way she was happy then. And it was beautiful. And Pestilence