Fiction A sample of a work in progress - I really like scary stories so I thought I would try my hand at one. I would like to make it something between a book and a graphic novel CD ROM. Bioluminescence by Victoria Vaughn-Perling   I  love the night, the cool dark of it. The cities hum a different tune at night - all crackly neon and freeways hissing like ancient snakes. Here dusk's darkening veil transforms this city from dirty factory town, criss-crossed with grids of steel and concrete, to a net of electric bioluminescence which wriggles and squiggles with exotic creatures in a phosphorescent sea. Do you need a light? I have one here. Can you tell by looking at me that I am of an ancient and oblique lineage? A race of fluctuation and transformation; we are the ultimate chameleons. Yes, this is the time I love best, in this town, in a century where all is permissible, even expected. Endless simultaneous event; all times existing at once. I am gliding on the edge of infinity this very moment charged as a spring day, with all its promise of blossom and fecundity. No matter how old I am. And I am old. Have you been here before? This is where the creatures meet, here on this hill. They come to wonder what has been and what will be. Mulholland is a long and winding road with as many denizens as travelers. So many tender morsels, but then, what I eat depends so much upon what I am at the time, so much more than on my mood. I see now you look concerned, more so than a moment ago. There is really no need for you to be afraid,I only take the willing. Don't pull back, I will tell you of one of those times, to put your mind to rest. It was night, a night very much like tonight, with the same full moon and clear sky. I was wandering an empty stretch of beach searching for empty shells - a kind of a hobby with me. I saw a curled form tucked into a shadowed cove of rocks. And I, in my female form, came quietly, slowly, not wanting to wake it. It was a man with stringy brown hair. I watch it sleeping. I rode with it on its dreams. And what a tale these dreams told. He had been a man of so much obvious promise. I saw him as an innocent open boy, his mother smiling down at him as she sang to him, I felt the warmth of her arms wrapped round him. I saw him take his first steps and then later his first love. I smelled their passion, heard their cries. I felt through him her smooth skinned flat belly and her heaving voluptuous breasts and felt shaken by the clearness of her laugh. Time passed in quick-cut montages, the way it sometimes does in dreams and film and then I saw him graduate and get his first job. More time passed and I felt his idealism seep from him, felt his heart turn cold to his wife, that same sweet girl. What had happened exactly was hard to read but I saw him take other women. I saw him lie in business deals. I saw him heartlessly make decisions concerning many other people as though there were not consequences in the world and the whole time he had been drinking, drinking and popping pills. Ha, I make no judgments. Maybe it was fear or just lack of imagination, but I saw his face in his bathroom mirror, watched his dulling eyes regard himself loathing . And in his dreams he was asking himself the same question over and over: How? And I wanted to tell him, so I started singing. The dreams make the song, so each time it's different. I sang of sirens and Odysseus. I sang of young women with fragrant hair and smoldering eyes. I sang of summers flecked with fireflies and of windswept steppes and I sang the song his mother had sung, back when he was young. And by the end of the song he was gone and I tucked the husk of what was left of him into my pocket with the other shells I had collected that evening and walked on. His eyes had told me what to do and I obliged. Even then, I do not always take the willing.  When I sang for Oedipus he lifted his arms to me like a baby. I would have taken him there on the cliffs but as soon as I got close enough to smell him I knew that he was destined for another fate. The story he told later was untrue. He saw me dive off the cliffs and assumed I had fallen to my death on that hard shore below, but I had simply flown away. He was an omen of change, a plague on the land, and I knew at that moment that it was time for me to leave Greece and it's strong bronzed men with their throbbing veins and passionate hearts. And I had not eaten all those other men before him either that had walked along that same road to Colonius but I had so changed them so with my words that they had simply walked on - choosing paths which never led back to the lives they had led before. That was long ago and there have been many years and so many countries between then and now. I have stayed here the longest and I have never been more at home because I have never been more invisible than here in the City of Angels. Here I am just one of the strange among this carnival throng. I was born this way. Some are born with hemophilia, some with a pituitary imbalance. People can learn to live with almost anything as I have learned to live with my special difference, my genetic throw of the die. You have heard of the half-animals of ancient Greece: the satyr; half-man, half-goat and the centaur; half man, half-horse. Perhaps you heard how Zeus once transformed himself into a bull to steal one king's daughter and then a large swan to procure another. Her name was Leda, talk about biting the hand that feeds you, he took her as she extended the fruit-laden branch of a Mulberry tree. These are not just tales. There have always been the halflings. The werewolves and the vampires, all human - with genetic glitches that forced them in cognito to survive those times where the penalty for anything different was death. Of course, they are antisocial. There were times here, in this America, when something as trivial as a mole could mark a girl for death. If it was odd, it was evil. And those days aren't even done. And that is why I am still and will remain in disguise. If those like me were discovered we would be trapped, prodded and electrostimulated like so many bunnies in a row. So I stay in the shadows, and in L.A.,it's easy, easier even than in Cairo or Hong Kong. And food is easy here, that is a consideration is well. There are always opportunities. 2. Opportunities by Joseph Vaughn-Perling "Yes, there are," I said to her, reaching my hand out to brush some of her long brown hair from her face, "opportunities." "It must have been lonely for you, this life you have led." She responded as a shilaa would to vaayu, which is to say, she did not respond. As I could see the lights of the city reflected in her lovely eyes, I realized what was disturbing her: I was not afraid. After her story she expected fear but found only my intrigued agreement. I threw back my head and started laughing such a hearty rib-rocking laugh that it was she who drew back from me. I could not stop laughing or keep my hand from flicking out to grasp her forearm. She gasped at the strength of my fingers, wrenching her arm away she flung herself off the cliff. My laugh strangled in my throat. I threw myself out after her but she was faster and had the advantage of a head start. She darted over the rim of the hill and she was instantly gone. Furious with myself, I contemplated pursuit, but how? What is this marvelous creature, so different and powerful? How could I have been so rash? It was the situation of it all. Here she had taken me to this hill thinking she would do who knows what with me, confessing to me of her history, and then suddenly thinking that she had found herself in the clutches of a bigger monster than herself. Irony forced my laugh there on that hill but that was enough to cause her powerful flight. Later that night in my sanctuary it was the refreshed sense of loneliness that allowed me to weep. I had not wept like that since the assassination of Darius II by his generals after his defeat by Alexander the Marauder. I felt I knew her story too well. It was the story of my own life. And I in my surprised amusement and joyous revelry had ruined what may have been my first date with the only female creature like myself that I had encountered in a thousand years. Even for an immortal, lonely moments click by just as slowly as for any human. What precious dispair that did present! To be reminded of my isolation, a detachment that has spanned centuries, like a old war wound with whose pain I have become so accustomed, that is is never felt save when going over the old saws. That night I vowed that we would meet again. That wonderful creature would surely possess the release from my pain. She will have either the power to love me or kill me and I would not rest until that dire truth was known to me. A truth that would rouse my sleeping energies and bring back the flavor of my venerable might. Fire surrounded me during my meditations that night and the spirit of Zoroaster filled my form as if it had never waned. Yes my dear night-friend. We shall have opportunities. Copyright 1996 Victoria Vaughn-Perling and Joseph Vaughn-Perling.