Shift Change

by Kat Beyer

The town of Antrin Corners sat in hot summer darkness, from Hank’s Auto to Fred’s Coffin Refurbishment. Down at the Clothes Check (“No More Burst Buttons!  No More Teeth Marks!”), Sandrine had just finished mending young Jim Seely’s shirt, placing it in the cubby with the rest of his things, when Officer Smarandescu stopped in.

“Coffee?” she offered, hoping her voice didn’t shake.

“No, thank you; I’m almost ready for the coffin,” he replied, carefully looking into her eyes.

“All quiet tonight?”

“Well, yes, though it’s damned close to full out there.”

She pointed at her mending pile.

“Don’t I know it,” she smiled.

“It’s mostly the newcomers who can’t keep it together in the afterlife. You’re human, and anyway you grew up here. But the new people… Sometimes I think of going to a quieter beat, like New York. I hear there are some—sympathetic—folks in the force there.”

“Dumitru! Even you were new here, a couple of centuries ago. Be nice.”

“True: but that means I know the families. I know who’s carrying a grudge against whom. At least it’s all quiet on the feuding front tonight,” he joked shyly.

He hoped his voice didn’t shake, either. Her coffee might be appalling but her countenance was superb. The way she had looked at him lately, he had begun to hope she might risk the bite. It was a lonely coffin every dawn. Fred would widen it practically at cost, for an old friend.  Too old?

“It’s never all quiet. You know that, Dumitru. Some cub is always falling in love with some young vamp—or worse, fighting over a human—and then the moon goes full and all hell breaks loose. It’s like that Twilight,” she went on, smiling apologetically when he flinched.

“We don’t glow,” he grumbled.

“You do to me,” she replied before she could stop herself. He stared at her.

“Perhaps,” he ventured at last, “You might come for a flight at bat time, some night? If it doesn’t scare you. You’ve always been brave, for a human.”

She smiled at him.