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Page 1 of 4 Some children wish for ponies or princess dresses, but I wanted fangs. The world was just beginning to rouse from beneath its blanket of white when the math clicked to life in my head. If I were to forgo allowance from Spring through Christmas, I could, feasibly, cover well over half the cost of the permanent dental artistry.
“No,” my father said, with some measure of authority, “you can’t just get permanent fangs, Angela.”
Oh, but he was mistaken! Why, there was a dentist right in Detroit who would perform the procedure! “—it’s acrylic, I think. AND it’s a lot cheaper than you might think. You see, as I was saying about the allowance – if you add that, to anything you might do for my birthday, and lump it all with Christmas –“
“NO.”
No fangs beneath the Christmas tree for me. I was fine with that, though – because someday I would get them. And on that fine day, when I returned from the dentist (on my own!) he would see the fangs, and gush, “Oh! I guess I was wrong! When you asked for them, I envisioned huge, carnivore incisors.” He’d take a closer look then, clearly wishing he’d had fangs, “Those don’t protrude at all – your dainty fangs. Why, no one would even know you had them, until they really looked. Hmm. They really suit you!”
Of course, this was all well before I realized a coke habit might be cheaper than dental care for the teeth I already have. Incidentally, I do not currently bear a set of sculpted, permanent fangs.
At the time, fangs represented power. The persona I would embody, with those sharpened pearls beneath my lips… provocative, unapologetic… indomitable. I could part my lips, tracing those smooth, fine points -- coolly promising to mark the flesh of any man daring enough to play with fire. My smile would appear as a glimpse of a secret, my kiss the precipice of danger. From there, my legacy could only deepen. Would I bore of my lovers, summarily boxing them into coffins as soon as their luster waned? Or would I relegate a few of them to the basement, leaving them in desperate solitude, ravenous for any morsel of attention I bestowed?
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See? Dainty! |
The trouble with being mortal, is the inherent obsession with extending our end. Men have traversed unmapped seas to acquire even a sip of immortality – so, it is little wonder those of us too lazy to become explorers, and too sugar addicted to attempt to stave off the gradual decline of our pituitary glands would, at the very least, scrounge motivation enough to step into the cinema for a taste of what life would be like if only it were a gift without end. 
One of Edvard Munch's endlessly maudlin, impressionistic works. | Vampires are one of mankind’s unique ties. Every civilization, as far back as those heaven-less Sumerians, have dreamt of the undead. Babylonians and Assyrians feared the ekimmu, restless spirits hungry for victims. Greek mythology brought us the empusas, dreadful, demonic creatures who could assume the guise of man or woman, luring in their pray over time, fattening them up for a later feast. Tibet, lauded by some to dethrone the Germanic home of vampires, is steeped in supernatural lore. Blood sacrifices were made to some of the most feared of their vampires, the bhayankara. Even the Algonquin Indians of Maine were not without a wicked slayer of children. Their Toad Woman would enter villages, ostensibly distraught over a lost child, enabling her, through a mixture of seduction and tears, to claim another’s. |
The fanged undead were serious business. When the first vampire stalked into the modern venue of lore -- the cinema -- one must consider that barely fifteen years had passed since the castle of the deceased Countess Elga was set ablaze in the Carpathian mountains, under suspicion that she, or her departed father, had risen from the grave and were responsible for the sudden flurry of child deaths in the area. What those bellwether filmmakers recaptured were not inspirations from dusty Egyptian exhibits, or frightful frescos in the Himalayas, rather they were the fruits of bedtime whispers from parents and grandparents. Whispers of creatures some fervently believed to still roam the shadowed nightscape.
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