Two vampire brothers hunted by a budding witch. A girl captures souls in the shape of butterflies. A drug addiction invites a fairy to a 1920s dinner party. Something in the dark likes Plum Shelley. Welcome to "Rottin," a short story collection h...
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"Whatever you do comes back to you three times."
~ The Law of Three
HITCH:
DID YOU EVER SEE a rose open?
And I don't mean at the speed of life, all slow and dragging like waiting for Christmas morning. When the petals uncurl one finger at a time with the dexterity of an old woman's fist—I mean in lapse-time. When a rosebud trembles and changes shape, fanning in a breath. Opening every lip in the same amount of seconds that it took to write this sentence.
Oh, you have?
Good.
People rot the same way.
REMY:
THE MOTEL ROOM WAS cold on one side and hot on the other. Coke hung a sheet from the doorframe, separating the bathroom and the walk-in closet from where we slept, capturing and keeping the air from the AC unit where it mattered.
It lowered our fevers. Without the window unit rumbling at full-blast, we wouldn't manage to be in bed together. Not that I wanted to be in bed with Coke anyway. I'd much rather be in bed with Hitch. But Hitch would much rather be in bed with Coke and since Coke had no interest in silver-blondes who smelled like candy and rubber—Hitch slept by herself in the next motel room.
There was an adjoining door, but she locked it on her side. I know.
Her room had an old, rheumaticky oscillating fan on the dresser (the AC was busted). I imagined her lying atop her sheets, sweating—Not because her body temperature roasted her bones like me, but because August was a brutal time of year—and in my imagination, I could see her skin prickle whenever that geezer-fan exhaled across her bare arms and legs.
And more than anything I wanted to taste her.
The sheet kept the cold air captive, and passing through into the bathroom was like entering the Sahara from a backdoor in the Artic. But I did it in my sleep. I must have been asleep because one moment I was dreaming about salt and the soft ridges a dozen multicolored rubberbands raised on Hitch's arm where she wore them, and the next—
Coke had me by the neck, shoving my face into the tile floor. And all I could see was the toilet base and a ring of mold and when I looked up, the cracked sill on the partially open window I'd been trying to crawl out of.
