I have warm, fuzzy feelings about this piece. Its quick, its pointless, but it has a vampire and beef gravy, and that's what makes it fun.

---

It was a busy Friday afternoon, and I was carrying an armload of boxes filled with plastic spoons and ketchup packets when I first met Marckal Black. He was partially dressed in the uniform, but his hat was backwards and his shirt wasn't tucked in. His hands were in his pockets when the boss introduced us, but he did shake my hand and then help me carry my boxes to the front where a horde of hungry customers were waiting. I knew instantly, when I saw him, that he was a vampire.

His hands were freezingly cold, and his face was much too ashen to be healthy. It wasn't just palour; I'm pale too. But his was almost a grey sort of pale, and his brown eyes looked a little red to me. His hair was long and black and he had a bit of a widow's peak. Not a whole lot, not Dracula-ish, but enough that the second he looked at me, covered in ice cream and honey mustard sauce, I thought to myself oh yeah he drinks blood.

He worked as a the grill guy; he never wore an apron, he whistled the funeral march when he cooked, and he wore his hat backwards and sometimes, sideways. He was friendly and had a very mild temperment; I once dropped a can of strawberry topping on his foot (accidentally I swear) and he didn't even wince at me. He just picked it up, handed it to me, smiled with blindingly white teeth, and turned back into the kitchen. The other girls thought he was charming and cute. The fact that he worked as a fry cook and obviously had no money (and a really crappy looking piece-of-shit car) didn't matter; he had a winning smile. I tried to locate some fangs on him, but he never smiled widely enough for me to tell. He turned away from me when he talked. And he refused to open his mouth when I asked to inspect his teeth. He was a tricky bastard.

The on Tuesday, Claudia didn't show up for her shift. They tried calling her house after a few hours but no one picked up. Her cellphone was turned off too; the voicemail picked up immediately. They replaced her with Tiffany. On wednesday, Tiffany called out with a bad sore throat. Everyone assumed that it was a bug spreading around, but I wondered if it was Marckal feeding on the wait staff. Everytime another waitress called out, he seemed more and more cheerful and energetic. He sang popular rock songs (but shut up when he saw me coming) and sent out food almost as fast as the girls could send in the checks.

Then, one Saturday as me and him were closing up our respective sections (me the dining room, him the kitchen), I watched him walk into the dry stock room and I closed it behind him. The door's lock had been broken off sometime ago, and instead there was a metal padlock in place. I shut the lock and threw the keys away from me. I waited.

After a few seconds, I heard his sneakers shuffle back to the door. He was humming something. He stopped when he tried the door and found it locked.

"Hey, Jane?"

"Yeah?"

"...open the door."

"No." I leaned against the door and placed my ears to the wood. I heard his breathing.

"...I beg your pardon? Why not?" He jiggled the doorknobs a few more times. "Jane, open this door right now. This isn't funny."

"Not until you admit it!"

"Admit what?" he sounded confused and incredulous.

"That you're a vampire."

"...what?" He laughed a little nervously, unsure if I was joking or not, and knocked on the door. "I'm not a vampire! Are you insane? Open the door."

"No. What happaned to Claudia?"

"I don't know! She's probably sick." he huffed for a minute, then, as if he knew that I was pressing my ear to the door, he growled against the wood, "if you don't open this right now, I swear to God that I'll - "

"Just admit it."

"...fine. I'm a damn vampire. Now can you open the door?"

"A vampire could just break the door down." He swore under his breath.

"And what would it look like tomorrow when they see the door ripped off its hinges?" He paused, then quietly added, "and besides...you're leaning against it." I stepped back.

"I'm not letting you out," I said, "if you want to get out, you open it yourself."

"...fine." He was quiet for maybe a second, and then suddenly I jumped backwards about 4 feet when the space next to the doorknob exploded in a hail of splinters and off-white paint chips. A pale hand reached up to the padlock. He grabbed the heavy, metal thing and tore it right off. Tossing it aside, he karate kicked the door right off. He had been holding a jar of gravy and had, in the excitment, dropped it. The plastic lid broke off and thick, chunky beef gravy pooled around his slip-resistent sneakers. His hair was pulled down over his face and the hat was thrown aside casually.

Realizing I had no plan of what to do next, I merely gaped at him.

"Yeah," he said nodding his head pityingly at me, "that was really, really stupid, wasn't it? Seriously, what was your plan if I really DID break the door down?"

"Uh..."

"Yeah." He cracked the knuckles of the hand that had busted through the door.

"I knew you were a vampire."

He rolled his now blood red eyes at me.

"...yes, yes, you win, I am a vampire. Are you going to help me clean up the gravy or not?"

We pulled a bucket of floor rinse from the janitors closet and spent the next 30 minutes washing coagulated beef gravy from the floor.

"So what did you do to Claudia and Tiff?" I asked after a few moments of silence when we got down on our hands and knees to coax the bulk of the gravy into a bucket.

"Nothing." He scrubbed visciously at a puddle of meat sauce that had spread under the shelves. "They're probably sick."

"For real?"

"Mmm-hmm. There are two things that don't belong in a work environment: fucking and killing. It only leads to highly awkward questions later on."

"Oh. I guess."

We worked for a while, not talking to one another. Once the gravy had been more or less cleaned (though we had both decided that the sauce that had slipped into the crack between the wall and the tiles was beyond rescue and gave up), he leaned back on his heels with a tired sigh.

"You know," I said finally, wringing the wet rag in my hands nervously, "You secret is...uh...safe with me, I guess. I won't tell, I mean."

Marckal laughed.

"Oh, please," he said, "tell whoever you want. I'm not worried about it."

"So you wont kill me? We're good now?"

"Yes," he said nodding, "we're good."