I Hate Love

Writers Island, a great place to get writing prompts, is on hiatus for a while. I enjoy the challenge of writing fiction from a prompt so I have decided to start a series of prompts on my own, right here every Saturday. I would love it if anyone would care to join me.

Ever checked your stats and what search engine terms get people to your blog? There are some wild and woolly ones out there, but also some incredibly inspirational ones. That’s what gave me the idea to use search engine terms as writing prompts. I mean, I just couldn’t come up with prompts as good as this on my own.

The prompt this week is an absolute gift. I couldn’t believe it. There is so much you can do with it.

I Hate Love.

Can you believe it? Someone typed that into Google and it brought them to my blog. It is fantastic.

So please, join with me in writing whatever takes your fancy when you hear the phrase

I Hate Love.

You can write fiction, poetry, non-fiction, even include photography or art. Just leave a link to your piece in the comments section of this post. My only stipulation is that what you write must be a new piece inspired by the prompt. I would love, love, love if you would join me. I will post a new prompt every Saturday (a little earlier than this.) Why not give it a go?

Here’s my story –

It was nothing but a lie. Love. Splitting me open from head to toe until my soul was exposed, making me think I wanted an existence I never could have envisaged. Love, love, hooray for love. Love never dies. I hate love.

I am afraid of things I never considered as frightening before. Like sunlight and mirrors. I cannot bring myself to stand in front of the huge mirror in the drawing room. Its gilded frame jumps out at me with its burgeoning fruits of the forests and its mocking cherubs. Leering at me, taunting me with its reminder of what I really am.

Some call a mirror a looking glass. Look within and see yourself, see how you appear to the world. I cannot look, transfixed forever like Narcissus, because then I will know that there is no undoing what has been done, that I am diminished, that there is truth in myth. I will see the horror of what I truly am, no reflection, unable to capture the light, the mirror recognising only my absence, a monster drinking the blood of others. Vampire.

Love. I did it for love. Gideon begged me. We’ll be together forever, he said. Immortal. Roaming the world as we please. All you have to do is drink the blood.

The blood is acrid. You gag on it. Whoever said vampires crave the taste of it was deluded. We crave the effects of it. The dull, untarnished bliss. The momentary pulse of life in our deadened veins. The heat, the pull of it just like a prayer. But the taste is worse than death.

I endured the transformation. I feasted on Gideon’s blood – my master – like a virgin thrown into a state of rapture, filling my mouth, my head, my heart with ice and a burning blankness. I was numb by the end of it. I wished I could die in the normal sense. My regret was immediate. But I followed his instructions, a supplicant on my knees, drinking the blood of the innocent Gideon had killed minutes before, a rabid animal.

Each night I kill. I ravage. I feast. It is easier than breathing. I walk above the ground. There is no evidence of my pursuit.

Some of us taunt our victims, hungry for their pleas, their cries for mercy. I do not. I kill swiftly. I take no pleasure in seeing the light go out in another’s eyes. For each night, without fail, I remember what I once was. Alive. A human girl. In love.

Gideon left shortly after my transformation. He said I had changed. I have heard that it happens. Your otherworldly self can be opposite to the self that existed in the real world. You are brutal. You are fierce. It comes as no surprise – I drink the blood of humans to survive, lashing at the tender skin on their throats like I am piercing the luscious skin of a peach.

Gideon imagined me as some kind of ethereal princess, drinking blood from a jewelled goblet, wearing velvet gowns and silken shoes, my beauty captured in time for all eternity. He did not imagine I would turn into a charred stain of myself, clutching and moaning at the shadows as the realisation of the depth of my fate drove me to madness.

I love you but I hate you, he said as I lay on the ground, spent from draining the blood from four victims in a row, my mouth bloated, my tongue distended.

What does that mean? I called after him as he walked away into the maw of the night. How can you hate me and also love me? The thought was unfathomable.

The word alone hangs like a wraith. I must face this till the end of the world. I have tried to die, to starve myself of the blood but I lost control of my mind, of my senses, and killed solidly for twenty four hours.

It is quiet in this old house. I killed the people who dwelled within it. Their photographs line the walls. Their smiles assail me, accuse me. See what you’ve done, they cry. This is all you can be for thousands of years.

Evermore. I hear it in birdsong as I huddle and cower from the early morning. Evermore. I hear it in the clock chiming midnight over and over. Evermore. I feel it in the taste of the blood. I am tainted, I am doomed. I trusted in love and it wove me a rope which will forever bind me. I am in despair. Each night as sunset falls I utter the only three words that sustain me, over and over, no stirring anthem, just a torrent of loss and anguish. A cry only ever made in the dark – I hate love.