#but re this post is long enough
Something Weird I Heard About Rebecca / 1.7K
“You have to do that stuff.” Brooke traced her hand in the dirt to draw jewelry. Unlike Rebecca, Brooke had no siblings, but she did have working parents, and that meant a lot of time to watch the channels on TV she wasn’t supposed to know anything about. “When you get older you have to do sex with guys and shave your legs.”
A realistic fiction short story about a little girl (…?) who wants to be a vampire. Originally released as part of the LGBT vampire zine Blood & Breath by@vermilionzines; I am very happy to finally be sharing it with everyone here. Gender, monsters, and our worst literary fears: this one goes out to all the weird kids.
Image Credit: Igam Ogam on Unsplash.
first of all, this is a really good fucking story and you should read it.
second of all, the behind-the-scenes patreon post is GALAXY brain and worth the money and you should read that too.
third of all, i want to take a moment to analyze the way this story addresses girlhood and childhood and girlchildhood (which is sort of its own specific thing. read the behind-the-scenes of this post).
from the very first lines, rebecca is not Performing Femininity; she is doing what is natural to her (and literally natural in the sense that she is drawing in the dirt in front of a tree). when she brushes her hair out of her eyes, she leaves “a trace of mud by her lips.” to say this is a “perversion of lipstick” isn’t exactly right because that indicates that lipstick is the natural thing here & mud the artificial, when in fact it’s very much the other way around. i won’t get into the choice feminism question of “can lipstick be feminist” “is it antifeminist inherently to wear lipstick” (nuance, comrades, these aren’t questions with yes and no answers); i just want to draw attention to the way a story about Being A Child But Not A Gendered Object Yet starts with the main character mindlessly wiping her face & ending up with mud near her lip, in contrast to (adult) women deliberately applying lipstick and other makeup. yes my dms with yves look like this frequently. you wish you were us
the natural/artificial thing is especially important imo because the story goes on to imply that both rebecca’s mother and sister have body image issues (concerned with losing weight and banishing pimples). there’s a grittiness to rebecca’s childhood that it seems her sister has lost: she’s in the dirt thinking about drinking blood rather than becoming like her sister and “not eating real food.” (which i’m sure someone could call a Not Like Other Girlsism, but hey, rebecca’s like ten at most and her “i don’t want to be like that because it sounds like it sucks” instinct is imo perfectly understandable). throughout the whole story, brooke and rebecca show a disregard for their appearances. they keep brushing their hair over their shoulders because they don’t care how their hair looks; they’re drawing in the dirt; they need it out of the way for functionality reasons. (speaking of which, i really love how this story deals with kids. everything happening here is absolutely real to them; the narrative gives “rebecca wants to grow up to be a vampire” the weight of any adult litfic conflict, and the kids are both clearly children but also not patronized on a meta level.)
and hey, speaking of drawing in the dirt - they’re drawing houses, specifically, literally, and on a metaphorical level they’re drawing futures and narratives. both of them have an idea of what The World Looks Like (rebecca’s being that “everyone ends up married anyway,” brooke’s being that “you have to shave your legs and do sex with guys” when you grow up into a woman). the problem is that rebecca’s making a new one. unlike brooke, she hasn’t seen the vampire movies or read dracula; she’s constructing a vampirism that suits her purposes and desires. the vampires she describes aren’t, like, bram stoker’s. they are her own personal mythos, a contrast to the mythos of What Womanhood Is that both of them have absorbed.
which is where the goth girl comes in - dahlia’s the only girl rebecca’s sister knows who breaks gender roles. she “wears all black and she’s mean to boys.” and rebecca thinks she’s cool. and of course she does, because in a way dahlia is exactly the vampirism rebecca is creating. barring a few obvious differences (i’m assuming dahlia ages and doesn’t drink blood), everything rebecca has defined as vampiric (fighting mean boys, living alone or with other girls, not falling prey to gender roles) is just as doable by a goth girl as a vampire. which really drives home that the vampire thing is far less important here than the self-fashioning. rebecca’s drawing her house; she’s also drawing herself.
fourthly, the last line of this story fucks hard thank you & goodnight
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