The air tastes stale in the shop. Alice scrawls a few lines down in her notebook, keeping an eye on the register during the dead hours of her shift–

the store exhales. Dust.

plastic mitochondria

tending to its shelves.

–The doorbell chimes open, and suddenly the smell floods her senses: sinewy, tender, flush. She can’t help but stare at the glow, the pink hue of skin radiating straight from the Human to the pit of Alice’s stomach. Radioactive bloodlust strikes a symphony in her and she can only think of one word–

Life. The Human, a fair-skinned woman with red tresses flowing past her shoulders, floats through the drink aisle. She runs her fingers along a row of glass Coca-Cola bottles; streaks of water linger where she last touched them. Alice realizes she has followed the Human down the aisle.

“Hi,” Alice blurts out.

“Hey!”

“Let me know if I can help you find anything.”

“Okay, thanks!”

Alice spins around, and if she had blood to spare it would have all gone to her head by now. The hair on the back of her neck stands up with little fortitude, like spindly trees desperately fending off the full force of the wind. “Could be the cooler,” she lies to herself.

“Just, uh, holler if you need anything!” Alice says with a strained smile.

The Human nods. Alice turns back to the register. The air in the shop doesn’t taste so stale anymore. There’s something seeping through its pores now, gnawing at her:

Hunger.

“Actually,” the Human calls out. Alice freezes. “Do you guys have, um, I don’t know what I’m really looking for,” the Human trails off mid-sentence, and approaches Alice like a minnow swimming up to a shark.

The Human twirls her fingers around the aluminum cap of a liter of sparkling water. She looks Alice dead in the eyes, loitering in her abyss.

“I know what you are,” the Human whispers. The bottle of water crashes to the floor, shattering all over the place. Its shards bubble at the edges, hissing faintly like a serpentine choir.

“Why did you do that? That’s–someone could have bought that.” Alice asks the Human.

The Human leans in and kisses Alice, and the hair on the back of her neck gives in, falling limply to their roots. Alice pulls away, and for just a moment, fire and ice, accompanied only by the fizzling water under them and the hum of coolers around them, dance among one another. Neither extinguishes the other, into neither gas nor blood.

Then Alice takes her first bite.

“Oh my god, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” The words, both hollow and sincere, ooze out of Alice’s bloody mouth.

The Human smiles. “Do it again.” She throws another bottle onto the floor. Alice takes another bite, this time drinking in the sight of the Human’s thick, red hair. Alice wonders how anyone could be so thoroughly ablaze with heat without disintegrating into ash. Is this what the burning bush would have tasted like?

She finishes the Human. The water on the floor runs dark and moves slowly. It has stopped fizzing. Alice sees what she has done. The Human, now lifeless, looks like a painting; watercolor splotches stain her white summer dress, and her face remains frozen in ecstasy.

Alice speaks softly, “Thank you.” She stoops down to shut the Human’s eyes–

“Alice!”

Alice snaps out of her strange daydream.

“Earth to Alice!”

Randy, a neckbeard in his mid-40s, stands before her waving a broomstick in front of her face. “You dropped a bottle of Gerolsteiner. Clean it up, someone could have bought that.”

Alice scans the store. There’s no one in there but the two of them. She takes the cleaning supplies in, and sweeps up the broken shards into a black, plastic trash bin.