Mal du Siècle
by Raja'a Khalid
Kate Molloy, Studio Installation (Stripes), Oil on Canvas, approx, 30 x 30 cm, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
Mal du Siècle
Raja'a Khalid | MAY 2025 | Issue 45
My big sister was always predisposed to the bizarrest fancies, but it was only after she saw Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive that she started believing herself to have joined the ranks of the eternally damned. It started in the TV room right after the credits began to roll—white gothic letters on black as The Taste Of Blood from the official soundtrack played into everyone’s ears. Or maybe she was struck earlier that night, right at the start of the film when Tilda Swinton’s Eve sipped scarlet blood from a tiny glass like it was an eau de vie. We’ll never know the precise picture that did it, but somewhere in those hundred and twenty-three minutes Dilruba was bitten. She lay on the sofa for an hour after Ma turned on the lights, still and quiet, her long, thin legs drooping over the armrests until I nudged her and asked what was wrong. I can’t go to school tomorrow, said Dilruba. I can’t handle the sun. It’ll kill me for sure. When I held out the last of the popcorn to her, she waved it away. My kind don’t eat, she said gazing up at the ceiling, twisting a lock of her hair around her fingers. Ma pulled at her legs. Enough. Bed. Dilruba got up, went to the kitchen and returned with one of Pa’s traditional absinthe glasses from Prague filled with cranberry juice and made quite a show of pouring the red liquid onto her tongue. I pointed at the glass. You know we’re not allowed to even touch those. Dilruba just shrugged her shoulders. She slumped onto the sofa when she was done and arched her back as if in some kind of ecstasy, as if the juice was full of drugs, her smile revealing her perfect teeth stained pink. The traditional absinthe glass rolled from her limp fingers onto the buff carpet where it circled round and left a faint streak of red. At this Ma gave Dilruba a good shake, but Dilruba—eyes glazed over—was already somewhere very far away. I’ve been here for five hundred years, she said in a whisper. I lay next to her, put my ear to her lips. Are you a vampire now? Yes, she said. Inconvenient, I said. How will you survive all this sun we get here in Dubai? She pressed her teeth on my arm, leaving a sizable bite mark on the skin. I’m hungry, she said and I pushed her away and ran to my room.
She stayed up all night that night, surrounded by books off Pa’s shelf which she took to her room from where The Taste of Blood played on repeat. She piled them high around her like Eve does in the film when she’s choosing what to take from Tangiers to Detroit. In the morning, I saw Dilruba pacing the kitchen reading out passages from Don Quixote, Ma’s white leather gloves on her hands, her green eyes behind Ma’s Gucci sunglasses. They had made a deal, Ma and Dilruba, for Dilruba to agree to go to school which included the gloves and sunglasses but also the wearing of Ma’s white leather jacket because it was the closest Dilruba could find to match Eve’s. Dodging the sun coming in through the window Dilruba drained a tall glass of cranberry juice and as she raised a piece of french toast to her lips, Pa swiped it from her fingers. The undead don’t eat, he said. He was upset about the mess in the study, the absinthe glass, the pink stain on the carpet. Ma’s patience too was wearing thin but even then I knew that this was only the beginning.
Dilruba began to skip dance class after school and started coming home early. She bought a whole new wardrobe of pale-hued pants, leather jackets and gloves, and a pair of mirror-effect sunglasses so that when you’d look at her you’d see your own reflection, puny and pathetic. She’d keep the curtains drawn till sunset and at night she’d stay up all the way through listening to gloomy medieval music and reading Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu. She wore plastic fangs and bleached her black hair platinum white and dark circles appeared under her eyes which she made bluer with a touch of cheap eyeshadow from the pharmacy. When I cut my finger with the kitchen knife slicing an apple, she took the finger into her mouth. O negative, she guessed. The good stuff. She papered her bedroom walls with pictures of nineteenth century poets and writers, the Romantics mostly; Shelley, Byron, Polidori and spoke of them as friends. Suffice to say, my sister was turning into an island with no bridges to the world of the living. Or as she called us, Happy Meals.
One evening at dinner she tapped the side of the spoon to her glass of cranberry juice which she would now only drink from one of Pa’s wine glasses, always holding the stem delicately as if it was a crystal rose. I have an announcement to make, she said. Pa placed his hand on Ma’s and it was hard to tell who was steadying who.
What is it? asked Ma.
I’m going to change my name, said Dilruba.
To what? said Pa.
Carmilla, she said, eating a red bell pepper. She was eating again but very little and only red things; cubes of strawberry jello, grapes, rare steaks.
Pa looked at Ma. Where did this come from?
Carmilla’s the first choice, said Dilruba. From Carmilla by Le Fanu. Mina’s also an option. She’s in Dracula. She used to be human and then she became a vampire. But at the end she’s freed from her curse and goes back to being human again—
So you want to become human again? I asked, confused.
She is human, Ma hissed at me.
I’m not sure I can now, said Dilruba, raising an eyebrow as if considering the potential flaws in her logic for the very first time. I’ll go with Carmilla. It just sits right.
She was vibrating slightly, and I could tell her right knee was shaking under the table like it always did when she was negotiating something important with Ma and Pa.
Pa let out a sigh. You’re sixteen, beta. When you’re older you can change your name to whatever you like but right now, no.
Dilruba got up and stormed to her room. Gothic rock smashed into the walls of the house for nearly an hour when Ma and Pa finally gave up. Dilruba was now Carmilla. At least at school. Ma wrote a letter to Principal Haque. Just for the time being, she said. We’re hoping, as with everything else before, this phase too shall pass.
It was quite a coup for Dilruba, the name change and she had a smile on her red-stained lips for a week. Another top feat, perhaps even more than the name, was convincing her friends Layal and Chandni to join her as compatriots eventually destined for an eternity in hell. A single viewing of Only Lovers Left Alive was all it took. Layal and Chandni colored in bite marks on their long necks—they were Dilruba’s victims after all—and the three of them went everywhere with sunglasses and leather jackets and gloves, hair dishevelled, red food coloring trickling down their chins. On the weekends, I’d watch their band practice in the garage where the tunes grew melancholic and full of despair. By sunrise they’d be in Dilruba’s bed, their long hair and limbs in a tangle, lips still pink from all the juice.
It was only when the first baby goat was found dead and drained of blood in the middle of the school football field that things started to get really off kilter. Principal Haque notified the police and called an assembly where she warned of stern steps, even expulsion as a wave of hushed whispers rippled through all the students. Dilruba, Layal and Chandni sat in the back, in their sunglasses, arms crossed, yawning, looking like tired demons and dare I say it, very nearly like the real thing.
The second goat was found a week later, in the middle of the netball court. The third on the rehearsal stage in the drama room. Letters were sent to parents and Dilruba was part of the first wave of students called into Principal Haque’s office.
They’ve got nothing on me, Dilruba said in the car as Ma drove us home. She was chewing Blood Gum she’d picked up from the joke shop and her tongue was ruby red.
You can see why they’d suspect you, right? said Ma.
I suppose, said Dilruba with a shrug.
Where are you getting the goats? I asked from the back seat.
Dilruba turned around, licked her lips with that impossibly red tongue of hers. Why? You want in? Want a lil sip sis? I’ll have to turn you first—
Enough! said Ma.
I looked closely at Dilruba then. At her white-blonde, mussed up hair, the marble-like skin with that tinge of gray. At school she had always been a straight A student with a streak of cuckoo. There was the time she refused to take off her skates for a month, when she’d zoomed from room to room knocking over side tables and lamps. There was the time she got into knives and used her pocket money to amass for herself a collection of Frederick Perrins and became the envy of most boys at school. If I tried to follow her though, she’d say stop, remind me of the four years between us, remind me that I was just a child and so I’d take a step back, stand on the sidelines and watch Dilruba give herself over to the part with a thrilling intensity and no part ever lasted too long. She always found something else. But this time I wondered if she had finally slipped. Had she fallen into a hole so deep that it was hard for her to come back out. Was she there at this moment, in a dark place alone. I looked at her arms and spotted some cuts and bruises. I imagined her in the night, a baby goat with the legs tied up on her back. Could she do it? At home Pa sat down with Dilruba and begged her to tell the truth. But Dilruba gave nothing, her eyes hidden, lips scarlet.
There were nine goats in total. Over nine weeks. And then it stopped. Some local boys had been apprehended for hurling cats onto the highway and rumor had it they were behind the goats too. The day that story broke out I saw Dilruba laughing under a tree in the garden after maghrib with Layal and Chandni. I asked what was so funny.
Let’s turn her, said Layal, walking up to me slowly and kissing my wrist with red lips like chewed up berries.
She’s just a baby, said Dilruba. Baby, go back inside.
Make me like you, I wanted to say. Make me whatever it is that you’ve become. I imagined myself, eyes behind sunglasses, fangs stained pink, a demon of a girl. But the words wouldn’t come out. Dilruba would always be unreachable. She had made the years between us an ocean that couldn’t be crossed. I went up to my room and saw the red smudge Layal had left on my wrist. I tasted it and it was no sweet juice but some kind of metal and it made me feel…a strange new pulse on my skin. I bit my lip, drew blood and let that faint trickle sit on my tongue. I parted the sheer curtain and saw Dilruba, Layal and Chandni from my window and they took off their sunglasses and looked straight up at me. I could see the moon in their eyes. They really had slipped into something dark. And now so had I.
Raja’a Khalid is a Saudi-born, Dubai-raised (and based) artist and writer with an MFA in Art from Cornell University. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee (2025) and her stories appear or are forthcoming in Vestoj, Jet Fuel Review, HAD, Maudlin House, SAND Journal and Yalobusha Review.
Kate Molloy (she/her) is a practicing artist and facilitator based in Dublin, Ireland. Her practice engages with painting, clay and installation work and explores the feelings of uncertainty and intuition that develop during the creative process.After graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2014, with an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice she was shortlisted for the Beers London Contemporary Visions VI in 2015. Having exhibited work throughout Ireland and the U.K, in 2019 Kate’s first international solo exhibition Controlled Emotion opened at Skinroom, Hamilton, New Zealand. In 2023 received the Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award. Previous member of Engage Art Studios, Galway and Wickham Street Studios, Limerick. Current member of A4 Sounds Studio, Dublin.