A review by teniamonet
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

3.75

All life, to sustain itself, must devour life. - Lafcadio Hearn, “Ululation,” In Ghostly Japan

A 23 year old anxious, shy, clumsy and truly unremarkable young vampire with mommy issues. 

Lyd a young vampire, on her own in the world separate from her mother for the first time. This definitely wasn’t the type of vampire story that I was expecting. Lyd is so mundane and in this world that Claire Kohda has created it seems like being a vampire gives you no real advantage or special abilities. 

I don’t know where this sudden decision to flirt has come from. I suppose, in this room, in the very dim light, I feel quite powerful. Men, I think, feel insecure in silence and much more confident when there’s the sound of traffic and other people all around. And this room is completely silent. 

I lie down on the floor. It’s just plain concrete with nothing on top. No carpet or rug or anything. The cold feels good on my back. The lights are still low. I’m more comfortable in the dark. It’s not even that the lights in here would burn me; it’s that sometimes too much light is overwhelming, especially after a day filled with things I’m not used to doing much of - packing, moving, traveling. It’s too much input, almost painful for the brain, not necessarily the skin. However, sunlight does burn. Not in the way it does in films and TV programs; I don’t let off smoke or singe, or burst into flames. Rather, my skin burns as if it has no pigment at all, as if I’m without any melanin, as if I’m completely and purely white. 

“Lydia,” she said, using my full name, which she only did when she was angry. “Do you think God would feed a body like yours?”

I had tentatively shaken my head, but I didn’t really understand. My mum continued: “Something else lets us eat, not God. God wouldn’t want to help a demon survive, and that’s what we are, Lyds. We are unnatural, disgusting, and ugly. Look at us; we are just sin.”

The missing suitcase feels like it means more now than it did earlier. Under this man’s gaze, I realize that I don’t really know who I am. My life in a sense begins tomorrow, when I start my internship at the gallery. Today, I’m still an embryo. My skin is thin and waterlogged; my eyes haven’t yet opened. The man’s gaze is like a spotlight. There’s nothing I have that proves I have existed and that i have an identity beyond my appearance. I shake my head and my big, black hair covers part of my face. I tuck my hands up into my sleeves like they are the heads of turtles sheltering in their shells.

I don’t know where the human and demon in me connect, whether there are roots that sprout from the demon and reach for and attach onto the human, or vice versa. Both live because the other exists. The demon survives off the blood my human body digests. And the demon, in turn, keeps my human heart very slowly pumping- at least, this is what my mum told me when I was young. When I imagine this, I see a little shadowy creature with feeble arms manually pumping the organ with bellows. Owing to the work the demon does to keep blood circulating, the human in me goes on living, and I retain some of the traits my human father passed down to me. 

We only ever got pig blood. This wasn’t because it was the only type of animal blood the butcher had. “Pigs are dirty,” my mum said once. “It’s what your body deserves.” But it turns out that pigs aren’t naturally dirty. Rather, humans keep pigs in dirty conditions, feeding them rotten vegetables, letting the mud in their too-small pens mix with their feces; the filth of the pig is just symptomatic of the sins of the human. Wild pigs eat plants. They’ve even been shown to clean fruit in creeks before eating it, and they never eat or roll around in their own feces. I told my mum this, but she was adamant that the pig was the filthiest animal and was what we deserved. It was what I grew up eating, never touching anything else — just thinking, dreaming, imagining the taste of other blood. 

I can’t really describe how it feels to have another person’s blood in your veins, feeding to your heart, even just a little bit: a human’s blood, not a pig’s, two legs, upright and elegant, hints of something - of foods and memories and experiences, of birth, of being ill and getting better, of love and grief and fear - in it’s flavor. I feel huge; I feel like, if I were to stand up and run toward my studio wall, I’d just break through it. Like I could trample on cars and people outside, whole families under one foot, roaring until ship windows shatter.

I felt no regret about sucking Ben’s blood out of the towel. I didn’t feel bad about myself, and I didn’t feel disgusting. I didn’t feel dangerous either, or more wrong than right, more evil than good. I think I realized quite a long time ago that the demon isn’t necessarily linked to God; it’s not the antithesis of human, or of the soul. It is just a different animal, which has a different diet from humans. 

When I was maybe nine or ten, my mum told me that turning me was the biggest sacrifice she had ever made, “because I didn’t know whether you’d grow up still or if you’d just be stuck as a baby forever, stuck as my responsibility forever.” But now I wonder whether she somehow knew all along that I would continue growing and whether she had just said that to make me feel indebted to her. And if that was the case, it worked. It excused her behavior. Her madness and her fluctuating moods, her self-hatred, while I was growing up. Everything in me that makes me anxious moving forwards in life, that makes me feel as though I’m doing things wrong, that I’m not on the right path, somehow, that I’m bad in some way, comes from her, and yet I’ve always forgiven her.

Now I wonder if I’ve been useful to her only as something she can pour everything she despises about herself into, something that she could raise to hate itself so that she’d have company in her feelings. “We are both things that have been raised not from birth but from death,” she once said. “From an ending rather than a beginning, and we will exist together until we die again and the world dies with us.”

We’re apart now. Properly apart. And I feel I can finally start my life. But the burden of her loneliness feels like it’ll never leave me.

I don’t know how other people do it. How do I go from where I am here, being moved out of photographs, and replaced with actresses like I don’t exist, to where I want to be? In just a couple of months, I’ll run out of money to rent my studio. How is it that vampires in all the books and films and TV programs always seem to be so successful and wealthy, and able to rent or even buy studios, flats, houses, sometimes whole estates? How is it that they all manage to feed themselves and stay so strong too - how can they all, including the good ones with sounds, get hold of blood so easily, while I’ve struggled to even get some fresh pig blood - while I struggled, now, to even replace what I got from a meager duck?

“Mum, I can’t take you with me.”
“Why not?”
“Because you make me feel like I’m not worth of life,” I hear myself say. “You just act like you’re dead, like you died when you were turned. How can I live my life with the shadow of that over me?”
“That is when I died. You know we are dead. Both of us. We are dead,” my mum says, though her cheeks are rosy. “The Sun has come for us, Lydia.” She looks at her reflection in the mirror. “Let me go with you.”

I think I have known for a while that neither side of me can be separated from the other, and that this is true of my mum too; that I can’t punish the demon by making it eat only pig blood without punishing the human; I can’t listen to just one side, and block out the other; I can’t force one side to be dormant while I live a life pretending to only be the other side; I can’t starve either side out of myself. Really, I don’t even have “sides” at all. I’m two things that have become one thing that is neither demon nor human. 

I’m not really sure what I am anymore, though - whether I’m a monster or whether I’m just a woman, or both.