you may also pry into letter 7, letter 12 or letter 20.

Dear Reader,

KK says all horror novels begin with the locale and a description of the weather, "The Reader likes to feel situated." It's a cool clear San Francisco night, streetlights diffuse the vast panoply of the heavens but if you drive an hour north the stars are astonishing, the sky speckled like the black-suited shoulders of a guy with really bad dandruff, so many holes in the black your heart speeds for a moment what if the black collapses a misty glow flows along my recumbent silhouette, long white gown, long white neck, a livid face leans toward the bed, translucent claws lift my hem immobile thighs, white, white over my breasts floats Nosferatu's head, an exaggerated egg-shape, powdery with pointed ears, his lips stretch open pencil-thin, taut I am so aroused my clit flicks like a tongue so tender is his bite but I will never love him, he's too weird too intense from my open throat dark rivulets curve sucking sounds in stereo suck across the suck dim air of the Roxie Theater and suck dissolve in the audience's laughter faces radiant with ridicule and popcorn I shout, "That's me on the screen you assholes!" The laughter pauses then soars, fine grains of salt stinging the corners of its collective mouth. Who am I anyway? In Dracula, "Mina Harker" was this plain-Jane secretarial adjunct to the great European vampire killer, Dr. Van Helsing. I'm the one who gathered the notes, the journal entries, letters, ship logs, newsclippings, invoices, memoranda, asylum reports, telegrams—I transcribed them and ordered the morass so the Reader can move through it without getting lost no hassle, no danger—i.e., a plot or an amusement park, Safari Land, Transylvania Land. For my performance evaluation Van Helsing wrote, "Oh, Madam Mina, how can I say what I owe to you? This paper is as sunshine. It opens the gate to me. I am daze, I am dazzle, with so much light, and yet clouds roll in behind the light every time." After Dracula corrupted Lucy Westenra I was next on his hit-list, but four brave Christian men destroyed 50 coffins filled with dirt to save my soul—but turn to the last page of Stoker PRESTO ABRACADABRA on the anniversary of Dracula's death my "saved" loins heave forth an offspring. A.k.a. "sequel." A big tease, a big mistake—for the past hundred years imitators have barged into my story and hacked out enough sequels to fill a library bunglers with no credentials they keep shackling me to the most insipid suitors macho types who stomp around with crucifixes and bad British accents their acting as wooden as their stakes: these men save my soul? Dodie's the latest intruder, getting it all wrong in her attempts to be civilized—forget about her forget about them—this is The Letters of Mina Harker the authorized version if you want anything done right you have to do it yourself sucking sounds suck up the silence my throat is a cunt never will I perish in domesticity like a Jane Austen heroine—I dart across the moor fog condensing on my long plait of hair, my lives my deaths multiple as orgasms HARKEN THE WORDS OF MINA HARKER, FORTUNE COOKIES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.

The monstrous and the formless have as much right as anybody else.

...

Our marriage certificate, the embossed announcement, this year's journal, a Long Island newsclipping, letters from a handful of sex-crazed gossips (my writing community)—I lay the pieces out for you one by one but they refuse the easy linearity of my earlier manuscript. "All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact." Oh, Madam Mina, good women tell all their lives, and by day and by hour and by minute, such things that angels can read; and we men who wish to know have in us something of angels' eyes. I wrote Dracula nearly a century ago—you'd think by now narratives would spout from me like fountains, their meanings clear as water black letters black paragraphs black pages, black gash across the naked torso of my desire Reader, you're probably too young to remember Newlyweds, but in my childhood it was my favorite dessert, a jelly roll of devil's food cake and vanilla ice cream, a stripe of brown beside a stripe of white, spiraling together, neatly, serenely in a slice on a plate you could eat it with a fork I haven't seen it in stores for years—I have to make due with the chaotic fragmentation of Cookies 'n' Cream, the taste is similar but what a mess—it looks like a Newlywed roll that's been pushed through a paper shredder or tossed beneath the blades of a lawn mower who's the jigsaw, who's the puzzle fingers wrap around my neck, pull me towards his whiskered face my cells open like snowflakes and KK says, "I can only push my words so far like a knife through butter, then the butter stops and the knife is still useful, and the knife is so useful." From my open throat dark rivulets curve; it's like whispering to oneself and listening at the same time I lie back and he ravages me like the Amazon rain forest.

Love,

Mina