Soul Drinker

November 20, 2024

This is something I wrote many years ago when I was working. With #MAGA, #Trump & #ChristoFascism in #USA this story shows the same kind of interpersonal dynamics were and are happening in #Australia. What do you think?

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I know this may sound paranoid, but I work with a vampire. Not the kind with python teeth and a penchant for late-night bloodletting, but the kind with a benign smile. You know the sort—so utterly benign that it edges into something too teethy, too wide, and too weird.

Don’t get me wrong; I like smiles. Who doesn’t? A good smile can make a room feel alive. But this one? It didn’t bring life; it siphoned it. The vampire I speak of looked perfectly mundane, almost banal—a “Mrs Jones” type if Mrs Jones wore floral blouses and talked about her kids’ gymnastics meets. Karen. That was her name.

When I first met her, I didn’t see it. I thought she was just another office mate with a knack for workplace small talk. She was a born-again type, constantly referencing “grace” and “renewal,” but not in a way that seemed threatening. Not at first. She didn’t want my blood—oh no, she was far too devout for that. She wanted something deeper. She wanted my life force.

Life force is a slippery concept. Call it vitality, essence, or spirit—it’s the thing that keeps you upright, that makes you feel connected. And Karen? She was a vampire of will. Soul vampires, will vampires—they’re not some romantic delusion spun from a gothic fever dream. They’re real. These are the people who drain you not with fangs but with their presence. Their words, their gaze, the sheer gravity of their existence. They’re P&C mums, footy club treasurers, and school fete organisers. People you’d never suspect. People you might even admire. You might be working with one right now.

“Come in,” she said the first day I met her.

I was standing in the staff room, scanning the cluttered noticeboard plastered with calendars and community events. Filing cabinets lined the walls, their surfaces piled with papers. It was ordinary, so ordinary, until I turned and saw her.

It wasn’t her floral blouse or her wavy, shoulder-length hair. It wasn’t even her shoes—practical, beige, and unremarkable. It was the way she stood. Like she was bowing to something invisible. Supplicant. Devout. A silent pledge of loyalty to… something.

Her smile was radiant, toothy, and hollow.

“Hi, I’m Alex,” I said, finding my voice.

She leaned forward, her posture impossibly still, and said in a tone that seemed to pierce the room’s fabric, “But I’m Karen.”

The air shifted. The walls of the room folded inward. No, not the walls. Space itself. She had, in one breath, devoured half the distance between us.

I glanced out the window behind her, desperate for grounding. The sky burned blue, the horizon a pale, parched curve.

I felt my feet in my shoes, my hands trembling slightly. I counted my breaths.

Karen didn’t need to speak to steal something from you. It was in her presence, her gravitational pull. She made every word feel loaded, every glance feel like an interrogation. She never asked for your trust; she simply assumed it.

Over the weeks, I noticed strange things: Karen’s uncanny ability to dominate the room without trying, the way she could turn a casual chat into an inquisition about my beliefs, my fears, my hopes. She wasn’t just a born-again Christian; she was a predator in sheep’s clothing, a hunter of souls disguised as a suburban mother of two.

Her questions weren’t questions. They were extractions.

“So, Alex,” she asked one morning as I sipped my coffee. “Do you ever think about salvation?”

It wasn’t the question that unnerved me; it was the direction it came from. Not her lips, but somewhere deeper, darker.

I started to avoid her, but it didn’t matter. Karen’s presence seeped into everything. My dreams, my work, my moments of solitude. She had a way of collapsing the world around her, making you feel like there was no escape.

It’s not just Karen. She’s a symptom of something larger. This century, the world feels like it’s unravelling. The greenhouse gases, the looming threat of nuclear holocaust—it all feeds the energy she represents—the born-again zeal, the clutching for certainty in uncertain times.

There are too many Karens out there, and they’re not going away.

I moved inland a few weeks ago, thinking the shift would help me escape something—what, I wasn’t sure. But instead, I found myself sharing a room with a vampire.

A soul vampire, a will vampire, a Karen.

When I look at her, I wonder if I’m paranoid. Then I see her smile—the way it widens just a fraction too far, the way it hangs there, benign yet bottomless.

And I know I’m not.

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Secrets Behind Sunglasses: A Poetic Conversation

November 1, 2024

The other day, I spoke with my friend who wore sunglasses, even at night. They were not just any sunglasses; they had thick, tinted lenses that turned his eyes into secrets. He sat in his bamboo chair, curled like an embryo in a second womb, and waited for the silence between songs on the record. When it came, he tilted his head, aiming his gaze—hidden behind the black glass—at me.


“Your passage shows a definite poetic sensitivity, an emotional quality that strikes one—but what does it mean?” he asked, words biting the quiet. “You are trying to communicate?” He leaned on the last syllable of “communicate,” stretching it thin, squeezing it like elegant toothpaste. “Aren’t you?”


I felt the weight of his question sink into my chest, leaving behind a sharp, echoing hollowness. I glanced at the poem I had laid bare on the table between us, exposed like a wound. His words transformed before my eyes into writhing maggots, their white bodies squirming towards the ink. Without thinking, I took off my shoe—a thin, worn sandal—and slammed it down. The thud startled the silence; the maggots burst, leaving wet smears across the wooden surface.


I didn’t speak for a moment. I scraped their remnants into an ashtray, their tiny corpses mixing with the charred remnants of past thoughts and past sins. I dropped my sandal to the floor. He laughed, a dry, brittle sound that cracked in the dimness. He crossed his legs, the fabric of his pants whispering like a taunt. The damage had been done—a single maggot had escaped my fury and burrowed, unseen, into my ear. I could feel it crawling, tiny feet clinging to the tender skin before settling into the cavity of my heart. It pulsed there, secret and vile. He knew it. His smirk was the proof.


Now I write to pull it out, strand by bloody strand, from my heart. I know that only when I spit it out, stained and gasping, will I be free.


This maggot is unlike the others; it shifts and moulds itself, a grotesque mimicry of thoughts, without shedding its true nature. Later, it transformed as I read Dostoevsky’s The Devils, a cigarette balanced between my fingers and a small, gleaming grain of eternity in the palm of my other hand. Between puffs and between sentences, I noticed that the grain had grown in weight. Kirilov had just explained why man must commit suicide to proclaim his freedom from fear. He was called a madman. I thought he made sense. I looked at my hand and saw that the grain had grown into a crumb. Realizing that Dostoevsky was performing the alchemy in person, I continued to read and commune with him.


The grain in my palm felt heavier, its edges pressing into my skin. My mind wasn’t playing tricks. It had grown into a dense and insistent crumb. I realized then that Dostoevsky had performed this alchemy, transmuting despair into something tangible, a weight that dragged at the fabric of the world. I kept reading, feeling the maggot shift inside me, watching with its eyeless stare as I communed with a man long dead but never silent.


The record ended while the needle turned and turned on the dead wax, and I looked up. My friend still sat there, sunglasses glinting darkly in the thin light, the smirk on his lips a question left unsaid. I inhaled, the smoke and the maggot’s secrets filling me to the brim.

I asked AI to make an image based on the writing. This is it.

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