Forever My Love – by VOIMA OY

Forever My Love

Voima Oy

My mother used to say I was Dracula’s daughter. Her first love was Christopher Lee.  She fell in love with his intense dark eyes and sharp white teeth. He was the one she longed for in the darkness of the balcony; at the movie matinees on Saturday afternoons. She bared her throat to the high school boys on hot summer nights, gasping for air at the drive-in.

She wore her hair like Morticia; I was her Wednesday child.

There was a darkness in me, too, a longing.  

I liked tight black dresses and bare skin. I became a creature of the night, haunting the dance clubs, drinking with the boys. Forever my love, I would promise, before I left them at dawn.

Now, my daughter has her own desires. She’s old enough to know her heart. If she says she wants to chase the girls and get a tattoo of deadly nightshade up and down her body, who am I to discourage her?

After all, it’s in our blood. Like mother, like daughter, I say. My beautiful daughter, her sharp white teeth.

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Voimaoy lives on the western rim of  Chicago, near the expressway and the Blue Line trains. Her writing can be found online at Paragraph Planet, Visual Verse, 101 Fiction and Unbroken Journal.  Follow her on Twitter, too— @voimaoy

*Featured photograph: art from Toby Penney*