I caress your skin, textured and rough under my pale hands. Your eyes button-like and unseeing, unaware of the mute tyranny of my gaze, my hunger. Your color is as warm and earthy as mine is cold and waxen.

A perfect potato.

I drop you into a plastic bag and lovingly secure you with a TwisTie. I place you in my shopping cart as gently as a new mother lays down her infant in a bassinet. You join my other captives: exotic orange beets, a flirtatious cauliflower, melancholy eggplant. My hunger is dizzying, and I must fight to hold it in check. My craving, like my very being, belongs to the darkness, too intimate and terrible to satisfy in the brassy, overlit presence of a dozen or more late-night shoppers at this 24-hour Almacs. I am paler than they are, and, I like to imagine, endowed with the kind of intangible hauteur that is a characteristic of my species. I cannot disappear, or turn myself into a bat, but I am a vampire, beyond good and evil. Though due to a strange, perhaps passing affliction, the warm juices of fruits and vegetables, and not the silvery elixir of blood, impel me along my lonely nocturnal forays. I am a predator. How these unsuspecting humans in front of me in the “Quick-Check” lane, unloading frozen fish fillets, breakfast cereal, and bathroom tissue would scream in terror had they the slightest inkling that an amoral monster stands within their proximity. Inwardly I compose a poem as I wait, trying to stave off The Hunger: