this jet black feeling

James accepted his job offer. Across a lacquered desk, the HR lady slid him his tools: three garlic bulbs in a mesh sleeve, jailbroken iPhone, four knives in a leather wrap, a small and shiny pistol. I'll email you the rest of the paperwork. Her red acrylics had grown a centimeter from her nailbeds. Her eyes were bored and tired, yellow from fluoresence. Her office was in an abandoned meatpacking plant; outside that single furnished room, the building was made of shadows, rusted beams, and empty space. You'll have to submit your full legal name, address, and authorize the background check. If you don't have a vehicle, it's recommended you get one. Are you in a relationship? James shook his head. It's recommended you get one as well. It lessens suspicion.

After his first night of work, James stomped two muddied boots against his porch. Blood blackened his jeans. Bad practice to leave the knives dirty but tired James couldn't fathom cleaning them right there and then. He left the red-stained wrap atop his bedroom dresser. Living room, lights off, TV speaker turned all the way left. The black fake leather couch hissed beneath him. The bong gurgled in his lap. He'd peeled the jeans off, heap on the floor beside three crushed beer cans. He flipped through every streaming service, flicking every movie top to bottom, left to right, falling asleep before he ever chose something to watch. This was ideal. He didn't want to remember the scream the lurch the crack of bone.

White sunlight burned through his blinds. James sniffed awake on the couch. He'd spilled the ashes in his sleep. The cream tile floor sparkled otherwise. He lived alone in that house and kept it quite clean.

He checked his phone, uncharged and at seven percent. 2 PM: work started in six hours. Cold pinch in his stomach, the feeling before a roller coaster's drop, when you're gazing at the rickety skeleton structure spiraling down below and you're up high enough to stick a finger in a cloud, and you think maybe I overestimated what I can handle. But he rubbed a number in his head, over and over, a worrystone, the number the HR lady told him, the number he'd half-report to the IRS the following year. That steadied him a bit. He groaned himself standing, down to the bedroom, stuffing his new work bag for the night ahead. He left out the knives. He'd learned the day before, the pistol proved more effective for the job.

After his second night of work, James plopped again on the couch. He fingered his lighter awake. He drained a can of beer. He turned on the TV and thumbed his phone down and down and down. He had Twitter only for sports statistics and storm updates, but the endless digital ribbon showed him the whole world compressed in small squares: a hot dog stuffed with cheese and coated in red-crumb dust, a woman in string-thin swimwear spread thin over snow, a looping gif of a small boy hit in the head again and again by a dropped glass bottle. All the Atlanta gossip pages flashed with the same video, its quality gone grainier with every repost. BREAKING: REAL VAMPIRE? FANGED FREAK AT MIDTOWN STATION. Phone footage shot shakily on the subway station: with only a streetlamp cutting through the oil-black night, a pale-pale man wearing gummed overalls and a greased ponytail walked too fast, fists balled in his pockets. Left behind and crumpled on the ground was a woman in a skin-tight off-the-shoulder beige Miami-club-like dress shredded at the side and seeping crimson. Passerbys huddled into their headphones, backpacks, rolling carts, duffel bags, clutched the hands of their children and pressed against their friends. The video wasn't frozen -- they were too shocked to move.

The HR lady had told James it was a special case. The targets rarely showed themselves like that in public. That one must've been getting real desperate. And where there's one, there will be more. Not that particular vampire though; he wouldn't bother anyone ever again. That evening, James had watched the pale-pale man choke on garlic. In an alley where security cameras had winked off, James pinned him, forced three bulbs past the man's tongue with his thumbs.

Not great that these Atlanta gossip pages made the video viral. Best if civilians were kept in the dark. On the work iPhone, from a fake account, James commented on every page that posted the clip. Fake lol. Blood is obviously just paint. or I'm never riding MARTA again the homeless ppl are out of control clearly. or another day in ATL LOL. It was just a precaution, though: every video, no matter how shocking, would soon sink under new digital slush.

On the couch, James brought the bong to his lips. Sharp whiffs of garlic from his fingernails. The HR lady had been impressed. Very few of our new employees take a target down their first week. It was a small victory he couldn't tell any of his family or bar-friends about. But it changed everything. In other jobs, James had killed rats. Mice. Roaches skittering blackly from fast-food sinks. Once, a pigeon. Now, he'd killed a man. No no no not a man. A monster. Just like roaches, they lived in the shadows, the pipes and tunnels and wet damp dark places beneath the city. Pests. Killers. He was doing good work. He was getting paid well to do good work.

But as the smoke cindered down his throat, as the beer plopped coolly in his stomach, as the mustachioed men jabbered on TV, the image of the pale-pale man's eyes rolling in their sockets draped itself over James's brain. The weed and booze and movies usually helped him ooze work stress from his pores. This job, though, he already knew, would be different.

James clicked around on his phone. He'd downloaded a dating app. He swiped, left right left left left. Finally numbness settled in his skull. All he could focus on were nose rings, drawn-on freckles, torn tights, dimpled smiles, hair bobbed or chopped in bangs, cocked hips, arms slung over other girls. Like the HR lady said: he'd draw less attention to himself if he wasn't a single man alone in an empty house. And it'd be nice to have a girl over after work. Something to unwind with. James imagined knees kissing under blankets, sweaty tangled sex atop the couch, walking side by side in warm spring weather with a girl in a white flowy dress. The thoughts coaxed him gently into dreamless night. Next day he awoke on the couch just in time for work. Again, he left behind the knives.