Redneck Royalty and The Mandrake

Redneck Royalty

by Gray Kishbaugh

I remember the day you watched me die.

It’s hard to forget something like that though. My lifeblood pooling on my fingers, hot and too alive; my heartbeat’s thump quieting in my ears; a dozen eyes on me watching and waiting; our father, fangs glinting in the dim light—

I don’t want to think about our father.

You’re quiet now, cheek pressed to the window of our Impreza as the trees flash by. You’re not processing any of them or anything. Even when the buck dashes in front of the car and the brakes slam on, you don’t blink. You don’t move your face from the glass. It’s cold and you want it to swallow you.

You can deny it if you want, Jamie dear. You can deflect, run, hide. But it won’t work on me. You know that.

Mother is driving, her hands clasped around the steering wheel, no God between her foot and the gas pedal. On the rare occasions she drives our car she usually complains that it’s not a truck, but she’s silent now. Her scarlet lipstick is messed up, dotting across her chin and cheeks in a display of carelessness foreign to her stoneware-pretty face.

This, I know, is my fault. And his.

The thought of him pulls at my seams. I can’t stop myself from slipping into the memory this time.

 I was taller than Dad, but he still reached out and cupped my cheek like he had when I was little. “I can fix this.” He whispered as if someone else was in the room with us, but we were alone. “All the pain, all the shame, Lynn… I can make it go away.” His bleach white fangs flashed as the dying LED light overhead shuddered and flickered.

I didn’t inherit the gift of night like you, but vampire or not I was still the child of two and sister to another, and that was enough for me to resist his sugar sweet words. (None of you like silver blades, but you seem to have no trouble with your silvered tongues.) “Don’t give me that riddle shit,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

He laughed a little. “There’s a Blooding soon.” His head tilted. “You could become one of us.”

My breath caught. A Blooding. A ceremony as old as vampires themselves, the only thing sacred to the unholy offspring of life and death. It was the source of their creation and power. A first Blooding would turn a human into a fledgling vampire. It required a vampire to allow a human to drink their blood and then to kill the mortal. They would rise during the night, turned.

If they survived the transformation. Only about half did. If the body and mind weren’t strong enough to turn, the would-be fledgling instead crumbled to dust.

What he was offering… it was dangerous. Risky. I didn’t know if I really wanted it. But in that moment, he looked at me the way he looks at you. Like I was a vampire prodigy, a sure-shot with a gun, the pride of the school district, and not an acne-covered human too fond of breaking things.  For that flash of a moment, I thought dad was proud of me, that he loved me, and I couldn’t find the word “no” in my vocabulary.

So I laughed, giddy with the attention, and said, “Okay. All right.”

You choose to break the silence as I’m basking in my shame. It jolts me back to the now, in the Impreza, my voice silenced and life reduced to nothingness. Your voice is weak, sore with disuse, and all you ask is, “Why?”

Mother’s lips draw tight, stretching with her quiet. Finally, she breaks. “Because it was a Blooding, Jamie. Just not for Lynn. For your—” She clears her throat. “It was for Christopher.”

We both notice her avoidance of the word Father. It seems wrong to call him that now, after he’s, well, murdered me.

Your dissatisfaction with her answer shows. I envy you, you know. I wish I could live in your world, where everything is black and white. Your world, where love is unconditional and your father doesn’t kill you for something you can’t control.

Your dark eyes flicker sanguine before you reign yourself in, trying to reconcile your thoughts with reality. “But… that makes no sense. A Blooding is for turning into a vampire, not—” you shake your head, run your tongue across your lips, “—not that.”

Mother jerks the Impreza around a turn – a move I would have scolded her for. You’re too exhausted to tell her to be gentle with our girl. “The first is a turning, yes,” she says, her words softer than her driving, “but there’s often a second. It frees the power from its bounds and elevates a turned vampire from a fledgling to true vampire.” She pauses before continuing, quieter now. “For his first Blooding, Christopher needed my blood. For his second, he needed the lifeforce of an innocent, a mortal. He needed Lynn’s.” The gentleness evaporated from her face, leaving it sharp and hard. “For his third, I’m going to make him choke on his own.

You wince. “But why Lynn? Couldn’t he have gotten, you know, another mortal? It didn’t have to be his own daughter.”

She glances at you and her face turns soft. “Because Lynn was easy.”

But that’s not it. Not all of it. I am his shame, his error, the proof of his insignificance and inferiority. A human born to a true vampire and a fledgling. Such a thing would have been impossible if his blood was purer, more powerful. You inherited all of Mother’s gifts, her power and prestige, but me? I’ve always been all Christopher, and all the parts of him he dislikes at that.

His eyes told me this every time he looked at me. His shame and frustration wrote itself into every word he spoke in my direction. I should have known he’d slit my throat. In death, I could shame him no longer.

But I didn’t know, didn’t even consider the possibility. Another way I take after him, for he’s truly a fool if he thinks Mother will let him live.

You’re worn thin as you let your skull bang against the headrest. “She was his daughter,” you repeat, your mind a skipping record player as you try to understand. “Why would anything else matter? What difference did it make that she’s mortal?”

“I don’t know, Jay,” she says softly. “I wish I had answers.”

The Impreza plows forward, relentless, as Mother turns and the road shifts to gravel. It’s soothing, coming back here – even if I’m not here, really. Or anywhere. Not anymore.

But I can taste the breeze in my memories as you roll the window down and inhale. How many nights did we drive along this road too fast, wind whipping our hair, voices straining to scream “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” loud enough to make even the trees’ ears bleed? How many times did you keel over cough-laughing in the passenger seat, a young buck with his horns in velvet dashing from the headlights, no one alive close enough to berate us for our irreverence?

Now it’s all gone, all behind, running through my fingertips like cheap watered-down whiskey. I’m too tired to catch it as it drips to the floor.

“You’re killing him,” you say, and it’s somewhere between a question and a statement. Your voice tremors and your face shutters.

Mother grits her teeth, exposing lethal white fangs. She nods.

You press a shaking finger to the car door, fiddling with the switch that raises and lowers the window. Your face turns to the outside as you shut your eyes, inhaling deeply. Pinesap, maple leaves, and dust. It’s what we know. It’s what we’ve always known. I wish I could breathe it alongside you instead of leaving us both gasping.

“It needs to be done,” Mother says. Her voice is soft but firm. She won’t yield to your qualms. “He’s betrayed us, Jamie. There’s no telling what else he’ll do if he’s left alive.”

“Yeah,” you say. “Yeah. I know.” But knowing makes nothing easier. It never has.

The two of you continue in silence. Mother’s free hand strokes the grip of the handgun tucked neatly against her side. Her brow furrows as she hits a bump, and I see her pain reflected in a momentary break in her inscrutable expression.

Then we reach the house. It sits upon the hill as it always has, trees shrouding the view of it from the road, our chalk sketches decorating the stonework of the garage. Mementos of our youth scatter the property: a chip in the wood railing where I bashed my head against it running too fast, a prominent dent in the garage door from when you were learning to drive, the scattered marks in the driveway stones from when we spray painted them red while trying to finish a school project.

It’s all still there, but everything is too still and too silent. The only trace of anything alive is Dad’s Silverado parked in the driveway. There’s a black garbage bag in the bed, oddly elongated and tied tight. I recognize the black boots that poke through the side of it. They’re mine. If I was still corporeal, I would’ve screamed.

It’s one thing to know you’re dead. It’s quite another to look at the still-booted feet of your own corpse.

Dad steps outside when he sees the Impreza pull in. He hails the two of you with an awkward wave and a half-smile. He’s paler, his eyes redder, his fangs more pronounced as they twinkle in his mouth.

Mother steps out first. You cave in on yourself in the passenger seat, wrapping your arms around yourself as you slink downwards, out of view.  It doesn’t save you.

“How’s my Jay?” He smiles wider as he asks, leaning forward on the hood of the car. “Did you have a nice drive?”

“You have some nerve, Christopher,” Mother says, her voice trembling as her hands curl into fists. Her eyes flash scarlet. “After everything you’ve done, you—“

He raises his hands in surrender. “I brought her body back,” he says softly. He nods to the truck bed. My nonexistent stomach churns. “We can bury her.”

It’s this moment when I realize: he’s not trying to provoke Mother. He’s not trying to hurt or pester you. He genuinely, honest to God, sees nothing amiss with what he’s done.

Was I ever anything more than a pawn to him? Was I ever anything more than disposable? This whole damn time it’s been a game for him, a vie for his own power.

I wish I could sob. I want nothing to curl up next to you in the car, press your head to mine, beg you to tell me everything will be okay and whisper the same lie back. I can do nothing but watch as Mother lunges forward and takes Dad’s throat in her hands, handgun forgotten as it clatters to the ground.

“You killed my daughter.” Her voice is a snarl, a fury I’ve never seen before glistening on her face. Her veins shift to black, eyes turning the brilliant red of a blood moon. Her fingers bite into his neck.

He doesn’t fight back. He tilts his head at her solemnly, resting a hand on her shoulder. “It needed to be done. She was a danger to us, a liability. A human. Now we can start over, do better.”

“She was my daughter.”  Mother’s voice cracks. “None of that matters. It never did.”

He looks at her almost pityingly. “It meant everything, Marie. You’ve always been blind.”

She throws him to the ground. Her brilliant eyes are wet with dark tears, her hands shaking. “You are not the man I married.”

He shrugs. “No. I’ve become more.”

They stare at each other, both lost in the fathomless depths of the eyes of the person they used to love. They came here to give us a better life, one where we could live without fear of being killed on the streets, one where we weren’t bound by the constraints of the monsters everyone believed you and our parents to be. But, a lifetime of that seeps into a person. Maybe that’s what happened to Dad. Maybe the world finally got to his head.

The handgun, forgotten by both, shifts. You’ve clambered free of the car and you take the weapon into your hand. You’re not afraid anymore. Your grief has become a knife blade: balanced, steel, and you’ve had the whole car ride to sharpen it. Your fingers load the silver bullet into the chamber and your arm, despite the duress, holds its aim steady.

One of us has to be a vampire prodigy, a sureshot with a gun, and the pride of the school district, and it was never meant to be me. Someone has to break things too. I shattered the cycle, and you’ll shoot it dead.

You pull the trigger and his body falls to the stones below.

Gray Kishbaugh is a Creative Writing major of Lycoming College’s class of 2026. Gray dabbles in all forms of writing, but will always be a bleeding heart for speculative fiction. They grew up in the rural northeast Pennsylvanian village of Unityville. Gray is a self-diagnosed cat lover, an incurable introvert, and an adept overthinker.

The Mandrake

by Grace Roat

Grace Roat is a Lycoming College student studying Astrophysics and Molecular Biology.  She works full-time as a paramedic having obtained an associate degree in emergency medical services. In her free time, she cares for her many animals and dabbles in acrylic and oil paintings. “The Mandrake” was created to be a birthday gift for her father, who carves wooden decorative and decoy ducks.