If you follow sports, you know there are “dream teams,” combinations of players who seem unbeatable. In basketball, the first such group to earn the title was the 1992 United States Olympic Team. In hockey, people again point to an Olympic team – the 1980 hockey players. In baseball, people generally point to the 1995 team in Puerto Rico.

But what if there was a team – two teams – that got stuck in the dream, forever.

Sure, Game Three of the 2018 World Series went to 18 innings before the Dodgers finally won, but what if it hadn’t? What if there’s a dimension where the game continued, inning after inning, after inning, to the end of time?

Imagine it… scoreless inning after scoreless inning, twenty, thirty, fifty, a thousand… more.

The pitchers don’t just exhaust their arms, they literally keep lobbing balls until their muscles are bleeding, until their shoulders disintegrate.

And the batters… at some point they turn on each other.

And that’s when the spectators realize: they’re part of the endless ballgame, too. They’re stuck in the same time-stop with the players and the managers and the coaches and the umpires. Realization becomes horror when they recognize one other’s pale faces, bloodshot eyes, more prominent teeth (are those bicuspids elongating, or are their lips receding from dehydration?)

Accepted lore says that zombies are created by other zombies, but if you put enough people in an inescapable location, for long enough time, creation is replaced by critical mass which leads to manifestation.

When the concession stands run out of food, the fans begin to kill and eat each other.

Sam the Sox fan rips off John the Dodgers fan’s head and tosses it over the fence, where it lands on the pitcher’s mound. It seems such a little thing to substitute it for the ball? The eye-sockets make good grips – like the holes in bowling balls. The blood is as effective – and as illegal – as the Vaseline used in old-school spitters (long-since banned).

And maybe, just maybe, the batter will balk  and the game will end.

It’s a curse, of course, the change into zombies, the bloodlust, the days, weeks, months, years, decades, and more of scoreless games.

Somehow, the teams never dwindle too far to call it.

By some sick miracle the crowd never noticeably thins.

But this is no field of dreams; it’s a field of nightmares where the scariest words anyone can hear are, “Play ball!”

Every dog owner can tell you that dog hair seems to have a life of its own.

Breed, color, age, coat-length and type, there’s always one commonality: the fur gets everywhere. In some cases, it even seems as though there’s more of the stuff on the floors and furniture than can be found on the actual dog. Even on the no-shed varieties of canines.

The stuff congregates in corners and bunches under beds. During certain seasons, you can brush enough of it off your canine companion to form his or her doppelganger out of the discarded fibers.

Own a dog long enough, or have enough dogs trotting through your home with drooling jowls and wagging tails, and you begin to wonder if maybe you’ve got it wrong. Maybe the dogs are really naked, and their coats – so lovely to touch, so accursedly painful when you get a dog-hair splinter in your foot on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night – aren’t just an adaptation to protect their soft parts and keep them warm.

“What if,” you muse aloud while your husband is forwarding through yet another commercial during the latest episode of The Flash, “dog hair doesn’t grow on the dog? What if it’s really a symbiotic life form, bent on taking over the planet?”

“Are you writing another story?” he asks. “Because that’s an interesting premise.”

“No, I’m completely serious,” you say. “I mean, consider: it ends up everywhere, it seems to multiply like crazy, and we don’t perceive it as a threat unless we’re allergic to the dander. And what about those allergies. Maybe they’re not just allergies! Maybe it’s a toxin released by this alien life form! Maybe these creatures are the reason dogs have comparatively short lifespans!”

“Or maybe you’re just annoyed because I haven’t swept the floor in three days,” your husband says, not without affection. “Can we finish this episode now?”

“Go for it.”

Your chihuahua jumps up onto the couch, and a single piece of his fur separates from the rest and spirals into your tea, but you don’t realize it until you take a sip and begin to choke.

At the funeral, everyone says you look amazing, and so natural, and how appropriate that even in death there’s dog hair clinging to your blouse.

It’s raining again – the storm woke her –  and she wants a cup of tea. Needs it, really. Most days are coffee days, but tea is better during thunderstorms. Especially at night.

Tea and oranges, actually. The perfect combination. One hot, the other cold. One dark and astringent, the other bright and quenching.

She remembers a time when she was a child, waking to the sounds of thunder and the flashes of lightning creating shadows and afterimages in her room. She remembers screaming in fear, and her grandfather coming to calm her because her mother was on a business trip and her grandmother always took sleeping pills on stormy nights.

Grandpop helped her into her fluffy pink bathrobe and let her brace against his strong shoulder while she slid her feet into her lion-head slippers. She remembers the way his huge hand was all calloused and rough against her smaller when they walked so, so quietly down the stairs.

The power was out, but he’d had his big green flashlight with the handle on top and the button her fingers were never quite strong enough to press, and it made a wide swath of light so she didn’t have to be afraid that something would grab her ankles through the open stairs, or that someone was lurking behind the louvered doors that separated the dining room from the kitchen.

“Sit here, honey,” Grandpop said, and she did, scooting into the chair right next to his, with her back to the window so she couldn’t see the tree branches turning into monsters with every burst of lightning.

The stove was gas, and she could hear her grandfather fill the kettle and light the burner with a match and come back to the table with six or seven of Grandmom’s saint candles – tall frosted white jars with different saints painted on.

The candlelight had made her feel safer. It was only a few minutes, but her grandfather returned once more with two mugs of tea. “These have to steep,” he said. He disappeared into the kitchen once more and came back with a paper plate and a bowl of oranges. The kind with a belly-button, except you didn’t call it that.

They had sat there sipping sugary tea and eating oranges until the storm blew itself out. Then he took her hand once more and led her back up the scary stairs (there really weren’t hands reaching through; it was only her imagination) and tucked her into bed. “The power will be back in the morning,” he promised, and left her the candle with St. Mary on it to guard her sleep.

But that had been when she was little, and now she is awake in the middle of the night, while her husband and dog snore in chorus, neither even aware of the light show beyond the windows. Awake, and craving tea and oranges.

She didn’t wear bathrobes anymore, but she pulls on a pair of fluffy socks and buttons on her husband’s flannel pajama top, and creeps out of their bedroom and across the living room to the kitchen.

The power is flickering, so she turns on the electric kettle then lights the candelabra on the dining room table. Oranges are always in the fruit bowl on the counter, well, those kid-friendly halo things, anyway, so she piles a few in a blue ceramic bowl and places it on the table with a paper plate.

When the kettle clicks off, she fills an infuser with loose black tea and arranges it in her favorite mug, then pours the steaming water over it.

The power flickers again and goes out to stay.

She carries her mug, a spoon, and the squeeze-bottle of honey over to the table.

“That’ll have to steep.” A familiar voice observes, and when she looks up from her mug, the infuser removed, the honey stirred in, she is startled. “Grandpop?” she breathes, because he’s sitting directly across from her, and, okay, he’s a bit see-through, but he looks good for a ghost.

“Felt the storm begin. Knew you’d be awake. Couldn’t resist the chance to see you… and try these new-fangled easy-peel things.” And he picks up one of the oranges and peels it, sending the tangy-sweet scent wafting across the table to tickle her nose. “How are you sweetheart?”

She brings her mug to her lips for a sip, formulating her response. “I’m good,” she says. “My book has gotten a really good response, my husband just got a promotion, Mom and Dad are loving their retirement. I miss you and Grandmom, of course, but there are times it feels like you’re still here, watching over me.” She laughs. “I was making tomato sauce the other day, and I swear I heard Grandmom’s voice telling me to add more garlic.”

“Sometimes we’re here,” her grandfather tells her. “But not in the way you think. We come close when you need us, add a bit of our essence to your own, but we mostly exist as memories. Strong ones when you need support, lighter ones when you’re just feeling nostalgic.”

“And tonight?”

“Well, tea and oranges, sweetheart, that’s how we survive the storms, isn’t it? I couldn’t let you sit through this one alone.”

“Is it going to be bad?”

“The storm? Not so much. But… you have a bit of a personal storm coming and I wanted to make sure you knew: your husband loves you, and we love you, and it isn’t your fault – it just happens – and you’ll get through it.”

She lets that information sit still inside herself for a while, and instead of pressing for details, asks him, “I don’t suppose you could tell me what it’s like for you?” As if it’s perfectly normal to ask a ghost for a description of the afterlife.

“Actually, I can’t,” he says. “Non-disclosure agreement. But… you don’t need to worry. Everything’s fine. Eat your orange, it’s dripping.”

She looks down, to see that she’s squeezed the section of fruit a little too hard, and juice is running down her palm and wrist. She eats the wedge and licks the juice away, and when she drops her hand, her grandfather has disappeared.

* * *

The miscarriage happens in the middle of another storm, this time in the middle of their morning routine. Her husband calls out of work and takes her to the emergency room, but there’s no fetal pole, and even though she hadn’t even known that she was pregnant, she’s sad about the loss.

Home again, she bundles herself into her husband’s pajamas and crawls into bed.

“Can I get you anything?” her husband asks, and she can tell it’s as much because he’s sad, too as it is because he needs to make her better, at least a little.

She glances out the window, and watches the rain fall for a long moment. Then she turns back to him. “Could you make me some black tea with honey, and bring me some oranges?”

“Tea and oranges?” he asks. “That’s it?”

“If you want… you could share them with me.”

And they spend the rest of the day in bed, with the dog at their feet and the pouring rain outside, drinking tea and eating oranges.

Angela never been entirely certain where the mirror had come from. It had been a constant presence in her childhood, waiting at the top of the stairs of her grandmother’ house, where she had to pivot to the right and step up onto the open hallway very quickly so that she couldn’t catch a glimpse of yourself in it’s wavy, greying surface.

She wasn’t sure how she knew not to look. It was something she felt more than something she had ever been told. Somehow, she’d adopted the notion that to stare into the age-warped glass would be to look at a cameo pin and find yourself in the silhouette. Even the frame – tone on tone scrollwork,  painted white with a stylized silhouette at the top – reminded her of those old brooches.

It was worse at night, even with the nightlight that was perpetually on, just beneath the mirror. Her grandmother was afraid of walking down the step to the landing in her sleep, she said, and of falling down the main stairway.

But then, her grandmother also hid in the back hallway whenever there was a storm, and kept four-leaf clovers pressed into random books, and screamed when the power went out, and didn’t have a single room that didn’t have one of those nightlights and a rosary tucked in a drawer.

Grandma’s rosaries, Angela thought, were as much a part of the woman as her rose-scented face cream and her need for ‘a little something’ after dinner. (The ‘something’ was always sweet – Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, Stella D’oro anisette toast, a scoop of chocolate ice cream with a drizzle of Hershey’s syrup and a spritz of canned whipped cream – she called it ‘gush gush’ because of the sound it made – on top.)

As a child, Angela had happily indulged in those after-dinner treats. As an adult, she recognized her grandmother’s dessert habit as both a ritual, and a way for the old woman to hold onto youth and innocence.

Just like she’d held onto that mirror.

Her grandmother, Angela reflected, was the only person who ever looked directly into the glass. It was too old, too greyed-out, too warped to be of any use… wasn’t it? She wondered what the old woman saw.

“… which brings us to the cameo mirror…” the attorney was saying, and Angela was jolted back to the present, where the furniture she had climbed on, played under, found refuge and solace and comfort in as a young girl, was draped with sheets, like so many judgmental ghosts. She could almost hear them whispering: You should have visited more. You should have called more frequently. You couldn’t even bother sending postcards when you were traveling.

“It belonged to your great -grandmother who brought it with her from Italy, and your grandmother would prefer it stay with the house,” the lawyer said. “She’s willed her house to you, Angela, but if you don’t want to live in it, she’s asked that you take the mirror.”

Angela thought about her sunny, plant-filled apartment, doing a mental comparison with the house. “I don’t have to keep the rest of the furniture?”

“Only what you want,” she was told. “What you don’t wish to keep we will arrange to sell on your behalf.”

“I’ll take the house,” she said.

“And the mirror?”

“And the mirror.”

She signed her name to a thousand documents, until her hand began to cramp and all she could think of was to go home and take a bath before she began to figure out what of the furniture she would keep – the baby grand, definitely, and the grandfather clock – but not the sectional, and absolutely not her grandparents’ bed.

It took a month for the paperwork to go through, but Angela used the time well. She packed her apartment, hired movers, arranged for the house to be cleaned and the yard to be groomed, and picked out new pieces to replace those she was leaving behind those she was selling.

Finally, she was moved in, the house she had loved as a child becoming her own now that she was adult. Touches of her grandparents lingered – the table of African violets that Grandma had sung to every morning, the red leather wing chair her grandfather had sat in to read his National Geographic and Newsweek and Model Railroader magazines, the piano that had been a fort and a ship and a mansion for Angela and her dolls before she’d learned to make music on it.

Tired from moving and memories, she made a simple supper and took her coffee out to the back stoop where she watched the fireflies in the yard.

Then she walked up the stairs.

She was certain that the nightlight on the landing had been removed before she moved in, but it was on now, casting it’s frosted-white glow across the landing.

As she had when she was a child, Angela crossed the square space between steps and hall very quickly, without looking at the cameo mirror. Then she stopped. Her grandmother had always smiled when looking into the old glass. The probate attorney had said her great-grandmother brought it over from Italy. What harm could it do, she wondered, to look at a piece of art that had given the women in her family such joy.

Slowly, cautiously, Angela turned to face the mirror, and lifted her head to gaze directly into it. She expected something bizarre, like a fun-house version of her own face. Instead, she saw a room with a wide window looking onto a garden of wildflowers. How could this be? She knew the mural on the opposite wall was both obstructed by a pillar and depicted an impressionistic take on a café scene.

Angela stared at the scene. The flowers were moving, as if swayed by a breeze. After the span of several heartbeats, a figure came into view.

“Grandma!” she breathed. She supposed she should have been frightened, but somehow, she knew she was safe.

There was no sound from the mirror, but Angela caught the scent of that rose face cream, and smiled.

The old woman kissed her fingertips and then blew the kiss toward the mirror’s inner surface.

Angela returned the gesture, saying, “Yes, I understand. I love you, too.”

The image wavered and disappeared, and the glass was, again, just a warped fading mirror.

Angela stared at it for a long while, understanding, finally, her grandmother’s attachment to it. She must have seen her own mother’s reflection, in whatever happy place that woman had envisioned.

After that night, Angela never dashed past the cameo mirror again, but instead paused to gaze into it. Most nights, she saw only her own reflection, slightly distorted. But sometimes she saw the old woman who had loved her enough to pass on her treasured mirror.

Angela missed her, of course. But seeing her in the mirror was enough.

“Bite me,” I ask him in the middle of one of our late Saturday afternoon romps in the sheets. “Please…”

“You know I can’t.”

“You can.” I turn my head, baring the side of my neck to him. He knows the spot I mean, the juncture of neck and shoulder. “I’m not asking you to draw blood.”

“Don’t say that,” he says. “Don’t even think it.” He hesitates, nuzzles the spot in question while his hand cups my breast and his thumb tweaks the nipple.

Beneath him, I give a slight jolt.

“Please?” I’m not begging, exactly.

“Honey, I can’t.” He meets my eyes when he says it, urging me to understand, and I do, but that doesn’t stop the wanting.  Still, he lowers his head to my neck again and licks.

It’s not a bite, but it’s almost as good.

“Oh, god…”

Our afternoon encounter escalates from there, until we’re both satisfied and sleepy. We curl up together and nap. When I wake, the room is completely dark instead of merely dim, and he is gone from the bed. I hear movement in the kitchen. He’s opening a bottle… I can smell the contents.

Wearing the t-shirt he’d cast off much earlier, I padd out of the bedroom on bare feet. He doesn’t hear me coming; I know this because he starts when I slide my hands around his waist from behind and lay my head against his shoulder.

“You’re cold as ice,” he says, “you’re hungry.”

“I’m always hungry… after… ”

I reach around him and grab the bottle from his far hand, then take a swig. “Not bad,” I said. “Tastes like a ninety-nine… maybe a two thousand. Virgin?”

“Virgin,” he confirms. “Two thousand. Carpathian blend. Shall I heat it for you?

“Please.” I go to the couch and wrap a cotton throw around my legs. He joins me a few minutes later, handing me my favorite mug – a smiley-face with fangs – full of steaming liquid. For himself, he’s got scrambled eggs and a hamburger patty. He says protein is essential.

“Full moon tonight,” I comment after checking an app on my phone. “You going out with the guys?”

“Do you mind if I do?”

I shake my head. “Nope. Francesca and Catherine and I have plans to see a late movie.”

“Home by dawn?”

“Home by dawn.”

* * *

I come home from my Saturday night with the girls to find that he’s home early. “Everything okay?” I ask, stripping off my clothes and climbing into bed with him.

He answers with a sly smile. “Everything’s fine, I just kept thinking about earlier… about how you like it with teeth… about how I couldn’t give you what you wanted.”

“You mostly did,” I assure him.

“I can give you more than ‘mostly’ now.”

I reach out to touch him, under the covers, and find a fine coating of hair. He’s in his between state, holding it for me.

This is the only time he can bite me and neither turn me, nor be turned. It’s a brief window we have in the last moments before dawn, three days a month. But I’ll take it. We’ll take it.

Such is life when you’re a vampire married to a werewolf, and you both prefer your horizontal recreation with teeth.