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Dearest Deirdre

I may be fantastically fit and good looking – but I’m hungry! This has gone far enough, too far, and I’ve had to resort to this public announcement in your agony column to put a stop to what is an intolerable situation.

A culture has arisen among women which is causing all sorts of problems. I did not evolve to deal with this. By your own arguments (see below) I belong to a superior race and we should be treated with due respect.

Despite your being inferior there are similarities between us. I’m almost at a loss to explain but I’ll use simple analogies which I believe may help you understand.

For instance, most of you enjoy eating. The point I’d like to make here is that you need food suitably prepared and behaving correctly.

Imagine a lovely chocolate cake sitting there all shiny and ready to eat. How would you feel if it leapt off the table and offered you a drink?

We like our food prepared correctly too but you are getting it all wrong, especially the flavour.

Another analogy: Think of the mess you find in a jam jar you’ve cleaned a paintbrush in – turpentine, globs of oil paint and the slurry resulting from plastic bristles dissolving. In a sense that’s what you’re providing, something similar anyway.

Few of you care too much about the living conditions your food endured and frankly nor do we care about yours. What we care about is how you die and the moments leading to it.

I’ve heard your kind argue for centuries that you are at the top of the food chain. You treat lower forms of life as you will. That’s exactly my point, well one of them. We sit at the pinnacle of evolution because we feed on you. Dinner is becoming impossible – and I’m becoming anaemic and whiter than ever. You are not preparing yourselves correctly.

You are supposed to be scared by us. Terror releases hormones of the best flavours by far – adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol, to name a few. Dreamy happiness tastes like … well, I’ve described that above. What we need are victims utterly paralysed by fear or it’s like trying to drink frog snot.

That you are not suitably terrified as we blast the curtains of your bedrooms open, and stand there in our red-eyed and bat-winged noble glory, is deeply worrying. Any men we attack are suitably panicked, but you women? Something has polluted your minds in recent years and we need to sort this out.

You seem to have got us all wrong. We are very nasty and make death as unpleasant as possible in order to prepare you for consumption. Having your throat ripped opened is not an enjoyable experience. The way we snort and gurgle when feeding sounds not entirely unlike listening to the Sex Pistols, Wagner and Frank Sinatra played simultaneously, too loud, too fast: and backwards!

I’ve had quite enough of waking young women in the dead of night only to find them happily surprised, falling in love with me and being revoltingly passionate as if I’m a wonderful romantic dream come true. It’s an appetite apocalypse.

Whatever is going on, stop it and be terrified before my race become extinct.

Yours

Vlad the Paler

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©Gary Bonn, 2018