Lamia / Λάμια

COLLECTIBLE SOULS (1,500 words)

Welcome to COLLECTIBLE SOULS.

Here you will find fragments of stories about the old gods that still walk among us today.

Some are benevolent, some are cruel, others are purely selfish, but in the end, they all take what they need to survive.

Photo credit: Aram Diseño on pexels.com

Joe enters the beach bar in the early afternoon, alone. Ironic, that. He’d only agreed to come on this holiday because the other guys were always on his back about being a loner, a square, never having any fun. Now, they’re all up in the hotel room, taking turns to hurl into the cracked porcelain toilet bowl, and he’s down here. Alone, again.

They rib him about being vegetarian too, but that’s precisely the reason he’s not upstairs right now. They all got food poisoning from some dodgy gyros on the way home last night, and here was Joe, fit and healthy, the last man standing.

He finds a table at the front of the bar, overlooking the sea. Sand crunches on the wooden floor as he pulls out a chair and settles himself where he has a view of the bar and the beach. Joe likes people-watching. He’s an observer—quiet, unobtrusive: the one people always forget was present when they rehash the story of a night out or a childhood memory.

Joe politely asks the waiter for a mojito. He usually drinks lager with the guys—they’d take the piss out of him for ordering cocktails—but they’re not here. His drink arrives and he sips it through the straw, looking out at the sparkling ocean and back into the room. It’s pretty quiet—a few couples, a few families with kids. He notices a woman leaning on the bar. She’s wearing a long skirt with a slit up the side, almost to her hip, and a cropped top. Her feet are bare. She radiates nonchalance, confidence, ease—all the things Joe doesn’t possess. She’s summer personified: lazy days and heady nights.

Joe knows one of his mates would make a move on her, despite the fact she’s quite clearly out of anyone’s league, but Joe doesn’t do stuff like that. Even though he’s 24, he still hasn’t really got over his pre-teen fear of talking to girls.

Not that he hasn’t had girlfriends: quiet types, like him. Like attracts like but, although this woman couldn’t be more unlike him, she’s definitely checking him out. Joe shifts uncomfortably. He doesn’t like that kind of attention. It makes him feel like he’s being weighed in the balance, and he knows he’ll be found wanting.

He looks down at his drink, toys with the slice of lime on the side and accidentally drops it onto the table. When he glances up, she’s standing over him.

“Can I sit here?” Her accent isn’t British or German like most of the people here. Greek, maybe.

“Sure,” he says, taking a gulp of his drink and choking on it.

Idiot.

“Sorry,” he coughs.

“What for?” she asks, sitting down opposite him, her elbows on the small table between them. “You want to know the secret to a good life?” She leans forward, her hand on his. “Never apologise.”

The hand reaches out, removing his sunglasses.

“Never hide your eyes either. People won’t trust you if they can’t look into your eyes.”

Joe stares into hers, mesmerised. Is she messing with him?

“W-What’s your name?” he asks, but she only smiles.

“Let’s not do that,” she says.

He feels his stomach clench with embarrassment.

Wrong question. Loser.

“Oh, don’t be sad,” she says. “I just think it’s more … exciting like this.”

Exciting? Joe has never heard this word applied to himself before, especially by a beautiful woman.

He gulps nervously at his drink, looking out over the sea, painfully conscious that she’s still watching him. He can’t think of a single thing to say.

When he finishes his cocktail, she nods to the empty glass. “Would you like another?”

She doesn’t wait for him to answer, turning and lifting her hand over her head. She catches the waiter’s attention immediately—of course she does—and holds up two fingers. Two cocktails arrive: one margarita for her and another mojito for him. She takes a sip, then says: “Let’s switch.”

She takes the stem of her glass between her fingers, pushing it towards him. Her suggestion, and the gesture, seem weirdly intimate, and Joe blushes. She smiles.

“You’re a nice boy, aren’t you?”

He rolls his eyes. “Isn’t that another way of saying I’m boring?”

“Not at all. I just mean … you are not—what’s the word?—crude. You are polite. You are … sensible. You do not do crazy things.”

“Right. Well, yes, I guess I am a nice boy, then. Drinking cocktails in the middle of the day is about as wild as it gets for me.”

“Is that so?”

She licks her soft pink lips, no doubt collecting the salt that has adhered there from the rim of her glass.

“There aren’t enough men like you left,” she says.

“Like me?”

“With honour.”

Joe smiles wryly. “Chivalry is dead.”

The woman sighs. “Yes, I’m afraid it is—almost. The men who come here now, they aren’t useless, but they are not as … satisfying.”

He looks at her quizzically, unsure of what she means.

“I’m sure you would be very satisfying,” she says, and he feels the blood rush to his face again.

Lame.

“Excuse me a second,” he mutters, and heads for the bathroom.

Is she for real? Is she coming onto him? What should he do? He has no map of reference—he never does stuff like this. His mates hook up with girls in bars, but not Joe. It took him four months to work up the courage to ask Lana from the second floor out for coffee, and he didn’t kiss her until she kissed him. Like the woman said, he’s a nice boy. Or is it actually that he’s always been too shy, too afraid of rejection? It doesn’t matter anyway. She’ll be gone by the time he returns to the table. Girls like that don’t wait around for guys like him.

But he’s wrong. She’s sitting on the wall opposite the gents when he exits, wiping his hands on his shorts because there aren’t any paper towels. Relief floods his body.

“Shall we?” she asks.

“Sure,” he replies, without a clear idea of what he’s agreeing to. All he knows is that he doesn’t want her to leave. He likes her—not just the way she looks, but her easy confidence and the things she says.

“Oh, wait. I haven’t paid for my drinks …”

She leans into him, her forehead touching his. “All taken care of,” she says.

Joe starts to mumble his thanks, but she holds her finger up to his lips.

They walk along the beach, barefoot. Joe’s shoes dangle from his left hand. The woman takes his other hand and intertwines her fingers with his. They sit on the rocks as the sun dips lower, and she kisses him again and again until his lips are raw. Then, she takes him up through the winding alleys of the town, back to her apartment.

The view from the tiny balcony is travel blog material: the white-washed village spilling down the hill, giving way to an azure sea under a sky fading towards sunset. But Joe doesn’t get more than a brief glimpse because she closes the wooden shutters with their peeling blue paint which almost matches the sea outside.

She turns to him, her eyes hungry, and he dares to pull her to him, kissing her slowly. The kiss lasts a long time and, when she pulls back, smiling slightly, he notices that her teeth are too sharp, her eyes black in the dim room, but he doesn’t flinch or pull away. She is still the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

She pushes him gently onto the bed. He can’t catch his breath. Desire and terror are vying for control now that he finally sees what she is, mere seconds before she sinks her teeth into the flesh of his neck. But when she does, he only surrenders. He gives himself up to the will of another, like a good boy, just as he’s done all his life.

He can’t escape now anyway. It’s too late. She will devour him as she has devoured countless men through the ages. Her appetite is insatiable, her hunger eternal.

And it’s so easy. Whether they come to her through lust or hate or self-loathing or, like this one, loneliness, they only ever think of the world in terms of their intentions, not hers. Her glamour is weak, but none of them ever see through it until she lets it dissolve because the idea of what they want her to be is so crystal-clear in their minds. And it isn’t so different from what she is: beautiful, damaged, desperate, always hungry, never satisfied. Most want to possess her, but men like this one—they want to know her, understand her, please her, and that is exquisite.

She can feel it, his longing for connection, even as she tears out his throat and drinks up his soul. It’s so pure, almost untainted—a rare thing in the world today. Lamia licks her lips and shudders with pleasure. It’s delicious.

She sometimes thinks she should pick off the bad ones: the cheaters and liars, the misogynists and racists … but the good souls just taste better.

Thank you for reading!

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