Read Chapters 11-14 of Vampire Girl here to get caught up on your women's history with Mayra, a female vampire protagonist!
Chapter 15
Beauty Queen of the Children of the Night
There was going to be a press conference to publicly announce the offer of an exchange. However, it was suspended at the request of Mayra’s attorney. Mayra didn’t even know she had an attorney. It turned out that the best lawyer money could buy that Jackie knew was Tobias, who was not actually a lawyer. He had done pro bono work at one time as an assistant at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Trampire, through family connections, had secured an actual attorney, a helpful Zapotec with a law degree from Harvard, who had recently been a clerk for the U.S. Supreme Court until it was discovered that her parents had come into the U.S. illegally twenty-five years ago after their entire village was murdered, so the Zapotec had recently been deported back to Mexico. But the Zapotec, despite being the only competent person in the equation, decided to take a wait-and-see attitude about Tobias’s plan, given her recent travails. Mayra was glad to see that Tobias’s nose issues had resolved. Usually she got swoony in his presence, looking into his ethereal cobalt-blue eyes, but right now she was ringing up zero. “We do not want you to be part of an exchange with El Chapo. That trade will hang around your neck like a garlic wreath for the rest of your possibly-eternal life. You will be more despised on both sides of the border than Kate del Castillo. You won’t even be able to get a job at Target. The good news is that you are building popular support right now. We have to let that image play out. Your plight has actually managed to get the letter V added to LGBTQIA. So, LGBTQIAV. How does that sound?”
Unpronounceable, thought Mayra, though she could see the Trampire was quite excited and had begun doing the Electric Slide in their holding hotel room, as it was now being called, due to the addition of some futon cushions and a wet bar. Mayra knew that in that acronym, the letter A, for asexual, was the one that really belonged to her. Her scarlet V was a sham. Longingly, she remembered the hyper-gymnastic lovemaking sessions with Tobias only weeks ago, how he’d flung her against the wall and ceiling in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fashion. She hummed Adele’s “Hello” low to herself. “Hello, can you hear me/I’m in California dreaming about who we used to be.” The Trampire, picking up the harmony line, hummed beside her. “I’m glad your singing voice is in shape,” said Tobias. Because here’s the plan. A beauty pageant.” “What?” “That’s right. The Vampire Ball is coming up and Lestatia wants to compete against you for Beauty Queen of the Children of the Night.” “I am not competing against your current slut-bitch LTR for anything. Wouldn’t your man-ego just love that? A bat-fight over you, co-starring your squeeze and your recent cast-off?” “Mayra, be reasonable. This pageant is only a vehicle and not an end in itself. The first task is to get you back in the country. You and this cute little transgender number are now a cause célebre. This international incident goes way beyond you. It’s a chance to strike a blow to the system for vampires everywhere.” “What exactly is the principle involved? Can it be summed up in the phrase Vampires are people too?” “I wouldn’t go that far. Something more like, It’s okay to be inhuman.” “Let’s suppose I sign on for this wrongheaded flesh-fest spectacle degrading to women and parade around in a sparkly bikini exhibiting my chi-chis the way millions of women do each day voluntarily on Facebook without anyone making them, just because of a narcissistic compulsion to show off their bodies after putting their settings on public to get more likes, so that anyone in the universe can use that photo for any purpose whatsoever such as being photo-shopped into torture-porn scenarios on the dark web or featured on the front page of Breitbart News as Megyn Kelly equivalents, because they effectively give up their rights to that photo forever as soon as they upload it. What makes you think the U.S. government will go for this ridiculous scheme?” “Have you forgotten that our president owns a beauty pageant? So long as he can figure out a way to directly benefit financially from this caper, he’ll be all over it.” “We’ve already felt the proposal out via discreet back channels—“ “Twitter, you mean.” “Yes, Twitter. And we have reason to be optimistic.” “Oh, all right. But the Trampire is coming with. This is a package deal.”
As long as Amazon is getting promoted here, please buy The Complete Manual of Sexual Positions: A Sensual Guide to Lovemaking, which you can purchase for $1.50. That’s right! A dollar menu for intimacy! A top customer review says, “If you only bought one book on sexual positions, this would be a good book.” (It does not say what would happen if you bought two.) This book will help you better understand the intensity of carnal coupling that took place between Mayra and Tobias, as this novel is not set up to provide hot, breathy, detailed scenes of quasi-pornographic prose. Note that if you are reading this novel many years from now, such as in 2049, this link may be broken and/or sexual positions may have changed.
Featuring the G-spot orgasm! https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Manual-Sexual-Positions-Lovemaking/dp/091718100X
Chapter 16
Ziphozinhle and Munzara
The news conference was set for the following afternoon. The U.S. president was all in. He became aware through his secretary of state that there was an outside bid in the offing from Tara Munzara, owner of the Miss United Countries pageant as well as the Miss Heritage Pageant, famously won by Ziphozinhle Ntlanganiso. It stuck in his craw the idea that Mayra might be stolen for a women’s empowerment pageant. "What more empowerment do they need?" he Tweeted. "They already have pussies." Munzara (as reported on Gawker) was set to offer Mayra asylum in Zimbabwe. The president saw this vampire beauty pageant not only as lucrative, with possible worldwide franchises, but potentially helpful to his re-election bid down the road. The Zapotec lawyer, whose photogenic quality, superior intelligence, heart-wrenching personal story, and mysterious Mesoamerican vibe were deemed irresistible for the occasion, agreed to speak at the press conference on behalf of everyone involved, on the condition that either: a) Indigneous People’s Day would be recognized as a legitimate national substitute for Columbus Day, or b) her deportation would be canceled, and she would be offered a position as a senior advisor to the president. She was offered the senior advisor position.
The next morning, before the press conference, Mayra was summoned to the judge’s chambers for a final interview on a few technical points. She had been growing more and more excited through the night hours, unable to sleep as she felt her hunger returning, possibly as a result of having seen Tobias, or just from the rush of suddenly becoming an international celebrity and getting the chance to beat that busty bitch Lestatia at her own game. As the judge in his chambers brought her close to give her a hug of solidarity and wish her well in the coming days, Mayra caught his man scent, accentuated by the breeze from an electric desk-fan, and went into a fang-sinking frenzy. She tore a deep wound into the judge’s neck, whereupon he swooned and fell to the floor, blood bubbling from an open hole. To her surprise, Mayra had never felt such a hunger, one worthy of Miriam. She’d always assumed the desire to feed was proportional to the hotness of the guy and the judge definitely was not slightly hot. Nonetheless, she drank at least a gallon of his blood, gulping it down as fast as she could, her loins warming, her tongue licking the judge’s face between draughts of blood, smearing his skin red. Getting to her feet, she staggered into the corner, panting. Mayra thought her head was going to explode, and she was on the verge of an orgasm. Leaning against the wall, she watched the judge’s eyes glaze over, becoming icy and transparent. He was pale beyond pale, and seemed only half the size he’d been just a moment ago. But he also got to his feet. “Wow. I can feel my testosterone going up. This is the treatment I needed. Thank you, Mayra. I must go home and give my woman the drilling of her life.” “Isn’t she in for a surprise.” “It’s just in time for our 30th anniversary.” “That’s so sweet, judge. I’m glad I could play even a small part in reinvigorating your all’s relationship,” she replied, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. At the press conference, the fact of Mayra being brought back in the country and El Chapo returning to Mexico was overshadowed by journalists’ questions about the propriety of the president endorsing the Beauty Queen of the Night Pageant, immediately buying a stake in it, and threatening to start a rival global pageant, Miss World Vampire, based in Zimbabwe, where he also owned several hotels and casinos. When pressed on the issue, he said, “I am the President, so I get to do whatever I want. If anybody else in this room is the President, he can raise his hand. Nobody? Okay.” The Zapotec former clerk for the Supreme Court and now Senior Adviser to the President of the United States was not asked any questions. Based on what you have just read, make up a plausible-sounding Zapotec name. If you want to give a name to the deported Zapotec attorney, out of compassion or for purposes of verisimilitude, do so, because she will never be mentioned by name in this novel. Extra points if you can write it using glyphs.
Chapter 17
Emojis
In a sparkly bikini, Mayra descended from the ceiling on a moving rope, into the auditorium, Cirque du Soleil style. It was a practice session but it felt like the real thing. Extending her legs and twirling, she channeled eighth-grade gymnastics from P.E. Her superhuman strength made it easy to suspend herself above the void and she showed off by extending her entire body over the abyss, holding the rope with only one hand, arm stiff. She felt a lot like Miley Cyrus must have in filming “Wrecking Ball.” But the song she had chosen to sing was Adele’s “Water Under the Bridge,” full of soulful auto-tune regret and a winking gesture toward a second chance. “Oh honey, if I’m not the one for you/Why have we been through what we have been through?” Mayra planned to sing it as a personal shout-out to Tobias and to fling the lyrics into Lestatia’s face like a musical fried egg over easy. Standing directly beneath her with a camera, a journalist from Breitbart News shouted “Nice ass! You’re a political sensation!” As her toes touched the ground, he asked her abstruse rapid-fire questions about DACA and AVIAC. It was all she could do not to bare her fangs to scare him away, but the last thing she needed in the run-up to the pageant was a front-page close-up shot of her evil teeth, after the incident with the judge, which luckily had turned out alright for her. In the changing room her phone vibrated and she saw a text from Cuac. “Heard about the undead thing. How come you didn’t tell me?” followed by a sad emoji. She sent back four apple-cheeked smiling emojis to show the depth of her remorse and that she hoped he wouldn’t be mad at her. Then, more seriously, she wrote “DJM.” There was a pause of a couple of minutes, what seemed an eternity, and he answered, “I don’t.” Scanning the many kinds of faces and other figures brought up by the keyboard, Mayra couldn’t find a single one that described the complicated emotions washing over her at the moment.
🧛♀️
Even if there had been a keyboard with a million emojis to choose from, none could have captured the essence of her being right then, or distilled the immense breadth of her longing. Instead, she tapped out: “I wish we had fucked the other night.” She resisted finding the tongue icon, because that would have suggested only a blow job, and that act fell far short of the encompassing passion exuding from her like a sweat cloud after a Zumba session. After a while, Cuac texted again: “Mayra, there are other things in life. I’ll be at the pageant.” Dressing in her street clothes and ducking out the back door into the alley to avoid any more intrusive journalists, she found in her jacket pocket the box of Virginia Slim Superslims that she had shared with Kim the Foodie. A single cigarette remained, with a book of matches from Chengdu Taste. She lit one and inhaled. The tobacco erased for a moment the faint tang of the judge’s blood that lingered in her mouth. Men. There were so many of them to be reckoned with. Recently, her mother, worried about Mayra’s indecision, had urged her to find someone and settle down, since she wasn’t going to be a professional violinist after all. She told the daughter, “You’re twenty-seven. The same age Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse were when they died. You don’t have forever.”
But it turned out that Mayra’s mother might have been wrong. Write a short story consisting entirely of emojis. Be sure to give it either a happy or sad ending.
Chapter 18
Lestatia
As expected, Lestatia had an attention-getting rack and great legs, and the steady, sedate gaze of someone who had been high school prom queen, whereas Mayra had always identified with Sissy Spacek in Carrie, ironic given how blood had recently come to play such an important role in her life. It would be interesting to have an event at the Beauty Queen of the Night pageant where she and Lestatia threw at each other buckets of blood they had sucked out of the bodies of various and sundry men, then turned, dresses dripping, toward the audience for applause.
Carrie Bucket of Blood Costume Hat | Raja, Rupaul's Drag Race | Award Winning | Horror Film | Red Bloody Headdress | Gothic Horror Pinup
But probably not even HBO was ready for that, unless it were an actual reality show where you got to know the characters first and were able to clearly identify the villainess, in this case Lestatia. In spite of Lestatia’s cool stare, Mayra could literally smell the fear on her, as being undead had given her a heightened sense of smell similar to that of a dog. The fear smelled like a campfire that had burnt down to embers then to ashes overnight, until it was entirely cold. The aftertaste of it lingered in the back of the throat. They greeted one other with an aloof taking of each other’s right hand, tacitly acknowledging that the other contestants were mere supernumeraries who had no chance of winning. They were shrubbery in a dubious morality play, a fairy tale in which neither woman wanted to be Little Red Riding Hood, and both wanted to be the wolf, and the happy ending was Riding Hood getting devoured. Mayra wasn’t sure whether to use a limp grasp to greet Lestatia, to project contempt, or a firm handshake, to project strength. She went with strength, and so did Lestatia. The two women pressed harder and harder, trying to crush the hand bones of each other, to incapacitate the rival so she wouldn’t be able to hold the microphone properly during karaoke. Mayra considered letting go, as she did not want to hold the microphone at a weird angle during her Adele number, thus coming off as a special-needs contestant who would get an award in a separate category, merely for being nice and trying hard. But she held onto Lestatia’s unexpectedly massive paw, taking satisfaction in knowing that her nemesis’s hands were actually bigger than Tobias’s. Mayra’s bones seemed to have become super-hardened somewhere along the way, for there was no crack and she felt no pain. When it became clear neither was going to win the handshaking contest, they let go and smiled, wishing one another good luck in the coming events. Just then, Tobias showed up, trying his best to look like an impartial referee. Mayra had to admit that he had gotten her back into the U.S., despite her Mexit blunder, and made her into an overnight celebrity. But was that celebrity to be short lived? Was this in fact a Carrie situation, where he and Lestatia were setting her up for a humiliation before a worldwide audience, including millions from Zimbabwe? Probably even Ziphozinhle Ntlanganiso would be tuning in to see who prevailed in what she called a “mind-opening journey.” And there would be Mayra, dripping blood, just as she had in the judge’s chambers when she tore him a new one and fell into a heavy-breathing, prolonged feeding frenzy, casting long strings of drool in various directions, shaking pink foam from her lips, listening to her own harsh, strenuous gulping, as if she’d been an immigrant lost in the desert who came upon a trough filled with putrid water and anti-freeze and buzzard guts, malarial flies buzzing around its surface, but she was so thirsty she didn’t care and plunged her head in to guzzle. That was what she feared. Lestatia took Tobias by the hand and affecting a ridiculous Deep South voice, said “Sugar pie, could you go back with me to the dressing room for a minute? My bra strap needs an adjustment. These enormous breasts of mine exert so much pressure on it.” Mayra could literally hear his supernatural hardon whack against his pants. How she missed it. He tried to cover, taking Mayra by the elbow, of all places, while Lestatia looked on with catlike contentment, saying “So glad you’re here,” as if he were a greeter at Wal-Mart. He was definitely p-whipped. Mayra really wanted to punch him in the face. Improve the following sentences from The Vampire Lestat: “I'm Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.” Or you can pick a different Anne Rice quote from Goodreads, or crib a verse from William Blake.