At midnight, we rise out of the bubbling cauldron of a hot tub, our bobbed red hair slick to our ears, our black-and-white gingham dresses clinging to our wet curves.
Because we resemble trad wives, we offer fresh-baked cookies on heart-shaped plates. Because this is Vegas, everyone thinks we’re animatronics. We’re real. Or like the Velveteen Rabbit, we became real once we were loved—or rather, desired.
Cats and blood: these are the only things we need.
Down under the water goes a pronatalist asshole in business casual. His blood tastes like moldy socks. He’ll come back a zombie, but no one will know the difference.
Ejected onto the plastic shore, he lies heaving, just another guy who wears his shirt in the pool and orders doughnuts weird. You’re welcome.
For our next trick, we smash our heads against a jagged glass outcropping engineered to resemble sparkling gems, anything to distract from the debacle of this everyday spectacle. We lick the blood from our lips. It tastes like first kisses in a car wash, machines churning and whirring while the windows slide and swish.
Going sideways is our specialty.
Here the men drool, and so do the women. We’re Cirque du Soleil for people who fancy they’re edgy: corporate slogs spending thousands on faux-bohemian Burning Man glamping, Resistance libs with pierced tits and dumb cat ears, MAGA men who want us barefoot until they see our feet have claws.
Inside, they’re all remarkably similar.
Just don’t get us wrong: we love dangerous pussy of the divine variety. It’s only that the dakinis rarely show themselves these days. When one does, she comes riding in all Whore-of-Babylon on a poet-headed lion, and we purr.
Knives come out. Sometimes we’re more vampiric, one of us slashing a wrist for another to suck, a wrist or a nipple, whatever the evening requires.
Lowering ourselves beneath the water heals the wounds and seals them shut.
Meanwhile, we recharge by straddling beams of light, gyrating against the pulsing water, heads thrown back in ecstasy. That’s when we shed our gingham dresses like snakeskins.
Naked, we are blue.
Out on the fringes of the city there’s fracking, and men in spacesuits euthanize painted tortoises because there isn’t enough room for them in their own homes. The men deny they are the aliens.
Pianos from Liberace’s museum lie splayed across operating tables in our memory: jeweled things with their shining guts exposed. We have lain there too, swaying beneath the knife, while great sharks circled overhead.
Quiet is an impossible cocktail.
Right on cue, a mangy animatronic wolf slides out above our heads to howl at a neon moon. Fireworks sound like the national anthem: pop, pop, another mass shooting for mass consumption, while every window in the casino hotel trembles.
Sometimes we remember our only real suicide: the man who shot himself and crashed through a window into our laps.
Three-headed, we became a temporary, monstrous Pietà. Cerberus with no bark, only bite. If Mary were a mermaid, we were Her as we held his three-piece-suited corpse and blessed him while he bled out.
Under the lasers, we commit suicide again every night as a distraction. No one questions why women are killing themselves in a show that begins with images of boys who grow into men who get guns, then girls who grow into women who get boobs, while “I’m Proud to Be an American” blares through drunken veins.
Vegas growls and sets our tits on fire. One man leans in to light his cigarette, then blows smoke slowly into our faces. Luckily, we don’t need air to breathe.
With our long blue tongues, we wipe the grins right off their faces.
X marks the place where there shouldn’t be water in the desert, but there is.
You shouldn’t be here, and neither should we, in this, America’s newest city.
Erica Anzalone’s work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Literary Review, Hotel Amerika, Juked, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection, Samsara, won the Noemi Press Poetry Award. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and is the founder of Witch Lit (www.witchlit.us) where she teaches creative writing.