#FridayFlash: No Fit Food

The muse vampire recoiled, yanking its long teeth from the neck of the human. It clawed at its own throat, screaming and choking with the burning acid that it had drawn from its victim. So intense was the shock and pain that it collapsed into full, tangible visibility.

Stumbling backward, it fell over an almost-full box of blank paper and crashed against a rickety card table, sending the dusty laser printer and a long row of books to the floor. "Bird by Bird", "On Writing", "The War of Art", "Plot and Structure", "On Writing Well" and a dozen other like paperbacks fell on top of the muse vampire, along with an ink-stained mug full of expensive pens and newly sharpened pencils.

At the computer desk, the human barely reacted to this supernatural intrusion. He turned away from the screen, glanced at the writhing muse vampire with sad, defeated eyes, then returned to the webpage he was working on.

Burning, tearing agony filled the muse vampire. Instead of feeding on warm, succulent mouthfuls of delicious creativity, it was choking on the vitriol that ran in the human's veins. Instead of gaining a few weeks of peaceful undead existence at the cost of what the human would have regarded as mere temporary writer's block, this was the end. The vampire knew it would die here, howling amid the detritus of just another nobody aspiring writer.

Confusion warred with fear and pain within the muse vampire. How? How could it have been so wrong? The books on writing, the expensive pens, the literary accoutrements... even if the human was a terrible writer of derivative fan fiction and boring porn, even that low-grade creativity would have been adequate food. How...?

And then the muse vampire saw what the human had on his screen.

And with the last of its dying breaths, the muse vampire shrieked. Better that it had tried to feed from an uninspired accountant or an illiterate watcher of reality television or even from a personal injury claims lawyer! Death came from attempting to draw sustenance from this... this... this inhuman monster!

Through blistered lips, the muse vampire cursed the human, knowing that no horror it could inflict could make the human suffer any worse torment than the SoulDeath the human had already inflicted on himself. With a final, gasping convulsion, the muse vampire died and dissolved into a smoking ruin of corruption.

The human paused, listening with half an ear to the silence that had returned to his lonely room. He didn't need the printer, the pens, the paper or any of the books. Not for a long, long time... not since he strangled his own soul and killed his dreams of being a writer. With thudding, unfeeling regularity, his black heart pumped the same thick mixture of self-hatred, despair, and anti-creativity that ran in the veins of every twisted half-human of his kind.

He sighed and returned to his work of copying other people's semi-popular webpages, slapping them together with a quick MOBI format and uploading them as Kindle books under a dozen different pen names.

And in the prison torture cell of his mind, the hissing refrain went on as it always did, waking or sleeping: plagiarist... plagiarist... plagiarist...

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