Vampires, Aliens, and God

No one should give birth in a coffin. Yet, it was with overwhelming distress and confusion that Catherine Dugat awoke in a blood-filled coffin and brought forth the convergence of two worlds. Light from the moon caressed her radiant olive complexion. She was, and still is, a woman of thirty years with an active beauty bathed in fear and optimism. Active, you might query? Catherine’s was a face blessed with planes and angles. And as light is always moving, it captured her exquisite features, giving the illusion of motion. Even in the tranquility of her perplexed stillness, the movement of her beauty was infinitely as subtle yet as certain as the rotation of the earth. This was the kind of beauty that a light-skinned African-Creole freeman and a high society, French prostitute could only produce every million or so conceptions, maybe. Seldom had a more delectable blend of Mediterranean, African, and European sexual exoticness come together in one sensual vessel. There were many in New Orleans who remember that the wind cried when Catherine opened her swirling eyes on that late fall evening. Dark as black pearls, brooding in their angularity, those very same eyes swept across her bedroom in a millionth of a twinkle. Still, she could not comprehend the significance of history in the presence of the moment. “Satan’s Ikea.” That’s how a buyer would describe the house years later when Catherine would sell it and flee the scrutiny of New Orleans. There was the marble armoire directly across from the coffin, lined with a Sago Blanco fabric. The piece was taken from a Romanian castle in 1476, at the end of Vlad the Impaler’s rule. Catherine found it in 1965, after the powerful Hurricane Betsy swept through New Orleans and caused the Mississippi to rise by almost ten feet. Catherine endured the city’s rage, and when the waters receded, found the armoire wedged against her front door. It weighed four hundred pounds. Catherine quickly dragged it inside and began its restoration. Next to the armoire was a 4-drawer, marble chest with platinum trim. Ordered and consistent, Catherine replaced the dark Maraschino lining with the same Sago Blanco fabric that adorned her armoire. The chest was her favorite piece, and she would rather die than have any harm come to it. Not that she could easily die, but she would rather. Next to the coffin was an original French Louis XVI oval mahogany center table with four legs and green marble top, made in Egypt as a gift for the king. It was a gift to Catherine from a suitor who had proposed to her unsuccessfully, many times. All of her treasured furniture overflowed with items of the occult and voodoo. There were amulets and talismans, spell candles and crystal balls, Pentagram pendants and Tarot cards, shrunken heads, blood powder and dislodged eyeballs. Paintings from the most famous artists hung on the wall…Degas, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and the original Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. The painting of The Last Supper that covers the back wall of the dining hall at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy is patently a fake. Catherine was not sweating when the first contractions racked through her lithe body. Yes lithe, but with a full and heavy bosom. Catherine’s kind does not perspire, and there is no research to support why. She was naked the night that she awoke in her blood-filled coffin. Blood had never been in her coffin before. At least not to this measure, brimming to the edge as it was. The coffin was given to her by someone closer to her than anyone, Lucius Marcellus. The name Lucius means “Light.” Aside from the fact that it was given to her by Lucius, it was not special in any way. When the first contraction racked her lithe body, she pushed her dark, auburn hair from her face and instinctively looked out her window, and up at the moon. It was silver. There was no break in its form or size. It was not rotating counter to its normal patterns, and she did not see the face of a Catholic Saint on its surface as some claimed to have seen that night. Yes, she could see comets and asteroids streaking through the universe with her naked eye, but that was not uncommon for a woman of her nature. The contractions forced her to grip the edges of the coffin with all of her strength. The wood screeched under the duress, and for a moment she felt like she might actually die. She wondered if Lucius had failed to tell her something nearly 60 years ago, when she was a woman of 30 and still is. “I’m dying,” she sighed. But she was not.