Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“By daybreak, the numbness had begun to wear off. The lemons relieve our thirst without ending it, like a drink we can hold in our mouths but never swallow. Eventually the original hunger returns. I have tried to be very good, very correct and conscientious about not confusing this original hunger with the thing I feel for Magreb.”

Clyde and Magreb use lemons to satiate their vampiric thirst, but the lemons are only a temporary fix. Clyde doesn’t want to confuse his lust for blood with his feelings for Magreb, because he wants his feelings for her to be something pure, and that he is in control of.

“And then she grinned. Magreb was the first and only other vampire I’d ever met. We bared our fangs over a tombstone and recognized each other. There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.”

This moment reveals this to be a relationship story. That is, despite the plot being about two vampires, here Clyde identifies that his struggle really centers on his relationship to Magreb.

“Those initial days with Magreb nearly undid me. At first my euphoria was sharp and blinding, all my thoughts spooling into a single blue thread of relief—The blood does nothing! I don’t have to drink the blood!—but when that subsided, I found I had nothing left. If we didn’t have to drink the blood, then what on earth were these fangs for?”

Clyde lived most of his vampire life thinking that he had to drink human blood, because he had always read in stories that vampires are supposed to drink blood. However, Magreb reveals that they don’t need human blood to live. While this is an initially freeing thought, Clyde begins to question things about himself. In this way, his relationship with Magreb proves that he doesn’t know himself as well as he originally thought, because he is redefined by her.

“To correct for her power over my mind I tried to fantasize about mortal women, their wild eyes and bare swan necks; I couldn’t do it anymore—an eternity of vague female smiles eclipsed by Magreb’s tiny razor fangs. Two gray tabs against her lower lip.”

Here, Clyde reveals the power that Magreb has over him. No matter how much nostalgia he has for his former way of life, his connection to Magreb is greater because he recognizes himself in her.

“Because I love her, my hunger pangs have gradually mellowed into a comfortable despair. Sometimes I think of us as two holes cleaved together, two twin hungers. Our bellies growl at each other like companionable dogs. I love the sound reassuring me we’re equal in our thirst. We bump our fangs and feel like we’re coming up against the same hard truth.”

Here, Clyde explains his connection to Magreb: despite the inevitable suffering of being a vampire, he feels comforted in knowing that he and Magreb are experiencing the same thing.

“But the lemons have never worked. At best, they give us eight hours of peace. We aren’t talking about the lemons.”

Before this moment, Magreb tells Clyde that the lemons aren’t working anymore. Here, Clyde admits that he knows she’s not talking about the lemons; she’s talking about their relationship. 

“I watch my wife fly up into the watery dawn, and again I feel the awful tension. In the flats of my feet, in my knobbed spine. Love has infected me with a muscular superstition that one body can do the work of another.”

This moment comes right after Magreb shapeshifts into a bat and flies off to her cave. Whenever she flies away, Clyde is filled with anxiety that she might never return, and here he admits that his feeling is a product of his love for her.

“I’ll put it bluntly: we are all becoming reelers. Some kind of hybrid creature, part kaiko, silkworm caterpillar, and part human female. Some of the older workers’ faces are already quite covered with a coarse white fur, but my face and thighs stayed smooth for twenty days.”

Here, the narrator, Kitsune, describes the basic premise of this story. She and the other women have been effectively conscripted into making silk for Meiji’s industrializing Japan.

“Every aspect of our new lives, from working to sleeping, eating and shitting, bathing when we can get wastewater from the Machine, is conducted in one brick room.”

While this moment describes the living conditions for the women in the story, it also describes the living conditions for many real-life women who live during Emperor Meiji’s reign.

“All Japan is undergoing a transformation—we kaiko-joko are not alone in that respect. I watched my grandfather become a sharecropper on his own property. A dependent. He was a young man when the Black Ships came to Edo. He grew foxtail millet and red buckwheat. Half his crop he paid in rent; then two-thirds; finally, after two bad harvests, he owed his entire yield.”

This describes what happened to so many farmers during Emperor Meiji’s reign, including Kitsune’s family, and it’s ultimately a factor in Kitsune signing herself into service.

“The Agent lifted the tea with an unreadable expression, frowning into the pot; as he poured, I thought I heard a little splash; then he cursed, excused himself, said he needed a fresh ingredient. I heard him continuing up the staircase. I peered into the cup and saw that there was something alive inside it—writhing, dying—a fat white kaiko.” 

This describes the tea that transforms the girls into kaiko creatures. Kitsune winds up drinking a larger amount of it than the other girls.

“I’m eating, I’m reeling, but I, too, appear to be dying. Thread almost totally black. The denier too uneven for any market. In my mind I talk to Dai about it, and she is very reassuring: ‘It’s going to be fine, Kitsune. Only, please, you have to stop—’”

This moment comes after Dai’s death, and Kitsune feels like she’s dying, too, because of her thread changing color. However, she soon finds out that she’s not dying; rather, she’s getting ready to change into a moth.

“That night, I try an experiment. I let myself think the black thoughts all evening. Great wheels inside me turn backward at fantastic, groaning velocities. What I focus on is my shadow in the stairwell, falling slantwise behind me, like silk. I see the ink spilling onto the contract, my name bloating monstrously.”

This moment describes how Kitsune uses her feelings of regret about the past to fuel her current transformation into a moth.

“The gulls landed in Athertown on July 11, 1979. Clouds of them, in numbers unseen since the ornithologists began keeping records of such things. Scientists all over the country hypothesized about erratic weather patterns and redirected migratory routes. At first, sullen Nal barely noticed them.”

This is the first line of the story and describes the premise, while also introducing the protagonist, Nal.

“He wanted to get to a place where he wasn’t thinking about every movement at every second; where he wasn’t even really Nal any longer but just weight sinking into feet, feet leaving the pavement, fingers fanning forcefully through the air, the swish! of a made basket and the net birthing the ball. He couldn’t remember the last time he had acted without reservation on a single desire.”

This describes Nal’s main problem: he feels incapable of spontaneously acting on his desires. This changes over the course of the story, with Nal ultimately able to act on some of his desires.

“As if in response the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle—too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape—and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal’s shadow and was pulling his darkness from him.”

This is the first moment that Nal describes the seagulls in an unnatural, almost magical way. This moment also serves as a foreshadowing for things to come.

“The hollow was almost a foot above Nal’s head, and when he pushed up to peek inside it he saw nothing: just the pulpy reddish guts of the tree. No seagulls, and no passage through that he could divine. There was a nest in the tree hollow, though, a dark wet cup of vegetation. The bottom of the nest was lined with paper scraps.” 

This is the moment that Nal discovers the seagulls’ nest. Before this moment, he sees multiple seagulls disappearing into this hollow, yet he sees that it’s not big enough to actually house multiple gulls. As if this weren’t perplexing enough, the bottom of the hollow is lined with objects that Nal thinks have been taken from peoples’ futures.

“The seagulls are stealing scraps of our lives to feather this weird nest I found in a tree hollow on Strong Beach. These birds are messing with our futures.” 

This is what Nal thinks, and he wishes he could tell somebody, but he knows they would just think he’s crazy. Further, his inability to do so plays upon his larger inability to act upon a thought or desire.

“I’m certain that I’ve never seen this man on any homestead around here—but he’s dressed for the work, with his cuffs pushed to the elbows like any man in Hox; and like Pa he has the settler’s scar from the moldboard plow. He’s a southpaw. A sodbuster. One of us. A newcomer to the Hox River Settlement? (NO, no, a little voice in me whispers, not new.) His eyes have the half-moon markings of a pronghorn antelope. He looks like he’s been awake for generations.”

This is one of the first descriptions Miles gives for the stranger that Miles encounters after the storm. Here, Miles acknowledges that he’s never met this man before, and yet this man knows Miles’s name and his family’s business. In this description, there’s a foreshadowing that something isn’t right with this stranger—he looks familiar, but old, suggesting that he could be a ghost or possibly some kind of monster. Yet, no matter what he is, it’s clear that he’s a product of his environment. 

“If we could just reach a consensus that this is Heaven, Rutherford snorts, we could submit to it, the joy of wind and canter and the stubbed ashy sweetness of trough carrots, burnished moons, nosing the secret smells out of grass. I would be free to gallop.” 

Many of the former president horses argue about whether the farm is heaven or hell. Rutherford thinks this debate misses the point; no matter what, they are where they are. If only every could agree, they could just enjoy the experience of being a horse. 

“She tries hard to spite the magazines and persist in her childhood belief that aging is honorable, to wear her face proudly, like a scratched medallion, the widening circles of purple under her eyes and the trenches on her brow. To be that kind of veteran.” 

While the title of this story mostly refers to the veterans of the Iraq War, here, Beverly offers another definition. Her own life has been where she’s often sacrificed for others, and this sacrificing has caught up to her more, now that she’s middle-aged.

“What happened when. Who was present in which rooms. Beverly doesn’t know how to make sense of who she is today without those facts in place. With a chill she realizes there are no witnesses left besides herself and Janet.”

This moment describes the malleability of memory, and how a future can be altered according to a past memory. While Beverly thinks of this idea in relation to her own life, she also realizes that she’s been tampering with Derek’s memories, thus altering his future. While she had always been certain that she was helping him, she now wonders about the ethical implications of her actions. 

“Now we all remembered him: Eric Mutis. Eric Mutant, Eric Mucus, Eric the Mute. Paler than a cauliflower, a friendless kid who had once or twice had seizures in our class.”

Before this moment, Larry and his friends have found the scarecrow-like doll that resembled someone they knew. After thinking about it for a while, they realized the doll looked exactly like Eric Mutis, the kid they used to bully. This describes Eric, and reveals how Larry and his friends didn’t think highly of him.