Brunch Bracket 16: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
by Megan Volpert
1. Buffy Summers
One bloody mary had actual blood in it and Buffy couldn't resist remarking that this one's got a real bite, rolling her eyes as she made her way back to the kitchen to kick some ass with the stain of it still on her lips. This was the first interruption of many. We were gonna eat these eggs, but they belonged to an alien spider colony with mind control powers and Buffy had to whack-a-mole them one by one, the linoleum an oil slick of their black blood. We were gonna try the chicken and waffles but it was home to a very tiny demon who cursed us to dance until our feet fell off, except Buffy side-kicked the jukebox until it and the spell both broke. The sun was setting now so we just ordered two burgers to go because she had patrol tonight, but the stools at the counter began sliding into a suddenly widening crack spawned from the edge of the hellmouth, so I had to fire drill all the oblivious civies out while Buffy peered into the abyss from which both her best ex boyfriends had come and gone quite a few times. I wanted to pee before we left, but don't even ask what we found in the bathroom. One phone call, two body bags, three steak knives and four hours later, we were home safe except for one wide open window, and this is what it means to be chosen.
2. Willow Rosenberg
We are giggling about what is the plural form of the word labrys. After a minute we just look it up. The table is covered with open books, causing the server not to check on us until Willow spills the green tea. She whispers quickly, saves the cup midair but not the liquid. Instead of a cracking ceramic sound, a quiet, wet splat that will not turn heads. The parts of Willow that want to be seen and heard in a crowd are few and far between. Because we both know they are already coming for us. We don’t have to make it easy but consider how we might make it hard without giving ourselves away. We can cast faster than anyone who can cast better, and we can cast better than anyone who can cast faster. The light belongs to her lover while the shadow resides with me. I am someone who can love even the dark parts, and sometimes I do. We debate whether every queer is a witch, and then whether every witch is a queer. We’ve held the hand of fate, met fear and fair and felt yet never said. She likes everything strawberry, fixed, things that bring cooling. I like whatever is unspooling, high mixed with low, things that reduce to ash. Both of us resolve to do no harm, but our definition of harm stays fluid in part because one of us is willing to take more shit than the other.
3. Cordelia Chase
If you've met one mean girl, you’ve met them all. If you want to be a mean girl, you've got to be a smart one first. And second, you've got to carry around a deep rage resulting from the older men behind every camera pressuring you to be no more than a pretty one. The way you hold your fork. The way you sip your tea. The way you flip your hair. You can take all that away from them. You can refuse to spit out your stale mouthful of half-chewed bagel between a hundred takes. You can eat. You can make them eat their hearts out just by letting a few astute remarks leak out of your perfectly pouty mouth. All you need is too much money or not nearly enough money. You don't need to go to a good school; you just need to enjoy its acceptance letter. Nobody really knows how a person gets popular, but everybody thinks they know how a person could stay that way. You can grow up into a detective and spend the rest of your life calling out criminal behavior, but nobody will stop asking who hurt you until one day the taste of some innocent bagel will invoke a moment of such sublime anger that you will recite for everybody the many names of the corpse on which you rest one foot, with your wounded backfoot firmly grounded in what has really been going on all along.
4. Joyce Summers
Show me the girl in the short skirt and long jacket who brought handcuffs to the party, the one whose breath is redolent with chocolate. Show me the prom date photos and the divorce papers. Show me the art gallery and the secret life she leads there, where everyone can safely assume her daughter is normal. Show me all the things that raise her heckles up on parent-teacher night and then how none of it ever happened. Show me her overwhelming disbelief that I am what I am, that I must do what I must do. Show me how she undervalues my saving the world as mere teenage rebellion. Show me the toast she burned on my behalf, the eggs she scrambled and the pancakes she flipped. Show me the too much money she flung at a white dress for the dance that will be soaked in blood by the end of the night that is like all other nights. Show me how she invites every boyfriend into the house, how she trusts police, how she picks up the phone, how she holds an axe and a report card. Show me how many spells she’s fallen under, how she believes in witches and once tried to burn them all. Show me how she can accept and cherish every crazy thing about a child, as long as it isn’t biologically her own. Show me her soap opera and her death by natural causes. Keep telling me she loves me.
5. Kendra Young
When my mom got knocked up, my parents had a shotgun wedding, and when she miscarried on the honeymoon my father never forgave her. Then I arrived exactly nine months after my mom’s next birthday, so I know what it's like to combat a family’s unquenchably life-long resentment, as if we had the choice to be here. Kendra’s parents were more honest than mine. They handed her over purposefully so she could slay her education, while mine just abdicated from caretaking and assumed I would smarten up on my own. Adults can be strict or they can be absent. Kendra and I are still two top dogs fighting for second place against momentary ghosts who are not really the enemy. We are twin Apollonian perfections, scarfing our bananas and oatmeal with a few crumbs of brown sugar, calling it discipline. Chasing vitamins with black coffee, calling it complying with procedures we're convinced are necessary for survival, for our work that is to save everyone from anything using pointy sticks and wits and books written in languages we have tried to teach ourselves to read. I didn’t even know there was a handbook and she read it far too closely, yet we are here battling same demons in different ways, breaking or following rules. One of us dies a little and the other dies a lot. Calling it a calling, a job, but it’s just who we are, how we were made, and this is what it means to be chosen.
6. Jenny Calendar
When she orders off the lunch menu, I know something is amiss. Jenny keeps the calendar alright. Her keeping was meant to be a grave of tiny checkboxes, but gardens grow faster than she can dig, until one day she finds herself in a forest with a sewing kit at her feet. I’m sure Jenny would like to be more like whatever animal who knows what to do with a sewing kit, an animal that never gets eaten. Desire like that is an unmade bed, and she gives away her attention, wondering whether this is gifting or else watering a thing that’s outgrown her. The giving is a sewing kit at her own feet. Jenny has been ungenerous toward herself. The forest has become something she loves to experience, and her love is a school bus where she tries not to nap, but she is lulled by the drum in her heart. Jenny’s willingness to discuss any of this is a recent surprise—a surprise like a branch snapping to ignite a fire that blows off the roof and it's sad but the hot air balloon being released from under the roof is Jenny. She missed the graves she dug when she was young and missing the forest for the trees. One thing she would change about herself if she could do so just by snapping her fingers is the trap of immortality. Maybe next time Jenny could be the animal who knows how to sew it all back together.
7. Drusilla
Having visions of the future might well amount to the same thing as being from that future, not that anyone will believe it in either case, as one might listen to a seer without believing. And listening is enough to create ideal conditions for torture, as if these visions do not amount to torture on their own. She has read the story of Cassandra and replies with a laugh that echoes across her loneliness. I know why Drusilla goes to extremes, oscillating slowly between a certain degree of madness and a wild amount of poetry, childishness abounding in all cases and weaknesses redounding in none. It draws bad men like mosquitoes, though she never swats at them because she has long ago seen them coming and set whatever is left of her mind toward a degree of surrender in advance. She cannot stop the whirlwind, cannot put a spike through it. We arrange breakfast at midnight and she knows the secrets of my order better than I do myself, making a little song out of the names of foods she will never eat. She imagines her doll collection enjoying these foods but blessedly does not invite them. I’m careful to keep the table always between us, but I admit to lingering on her magnificent manicure, her saucer eyes, her lilting voice, her wilting chiffon. It is difficult to leave the scene of a crucifixion, to tear one’s eyes away from the potent meanings oozing from every bit of wiggling.
8. Faith Lehane
Faith loved putting a foot over the line. Any line. If I went black tank with no bra, she was the very definition of black bra under white tank. Not once did we have it out about who was the bigger baddie at the end of the night. We were double trouble. Because it was her favorite, she always said breakfast was the most important meal of the day. That was her justification for eating it twice, both before and after slaying. When she got up in the afternoon, she would double fist a frozen egg and cheese burrito with a carbonated energy drink. Later, especially if the sun was just coming up, sometimes she would get bacon on her double cheeseburger or else extra fries. This was a breakfast. When the bill came she'd shrug and say she ran out of quarters. People always used to ask us if we were sisters. She would growl and say yeah, scissor sisters. Or she would laugh and say yeah, then point to me and say this is the one of us who graduated high school on time. It's too fine a line between self-defense and self-deprecation. Not to say that she ever felt doomed, only that she grew bitter from being so lonely, even though we were like two peas in a pod. She actually had a twisted kind of optimism in maintaining it would all turn out five by five, and this is what it means to be chosen.
9. Anya Jenkins
If you find yourself constantly running into demons, it’s best if you befriend just one who is moderately capable of assimilation into mainstream human society. She may ask a million questions that come off as neurospicy, or she may do a lot of overly detailed sharing about her boyfriend, or she may seem to care about nothing so much as she cares about money. The more regularly she exhibits these traits, the more often you will be relieved from having to display them yourself. In your wildest heart of hearts, being retired from the job of patron saint of scorned women might seem like an enviable position, but a thousand years of anything will certainly take its toll on anyone. You may end up terrified of fluffy, adorable little bunny rabbits. You may wear a disguise for so long that you genuinely become it. A demon can stop eating people and fall in love with fat stacks of pancakes dunked in bourbon maple syrup instead. She will make excellent coffee for her adventures in niche small business entrepreneurship. She will prattle endlessly over apple or pumpkin pie. She will even order something from Doublemeat Palace if that’s what the situation calls for. She just wants to comprehend the bare necessities of human life and is happy to offer good advice on how to prevent a hellmouth from swallowing the world for breakfast—or just die in it alongside you, as doing the stupid thing is the most human thing of all.
10. Halfrek
It's always just coffee because if we spend more than an hour together, she pulls the shadow right out of me. Sometimes I come in so hot that it only takes a few minutes before she sweetly inquires whether I could use an assist. Today is one of those days and I am vomiting up the request. May every anonymous man who has ever told me or any woman to smile more have their face frozen in place with a nice wide grin on it. D'Hoffryn delivers with ease as she sips on her mocha. There's chaos at the counter where the man who made the mocha used to be. Out the coffee shop window, we see a douche in a Porsche get rear-ended by a confused bus driver who is distracted by a man pissing his pants from surprise while his not entirely oblivious dog has stopped to sniff at a tree. By the time we leave there is not one man alive in a hundred miles who doesn't look like the Joker. By the time the sun goes down on this once quiet town, women are carrying baseball bats and the streets are littered with bloody, broken teeth. As I curl up at home with my cup of bedtime tea, I wonder how long the curse will last and how long before I outgrow being best pals with a vengeance demon. My affect remains mostly blank, as usual, but I'm smiling on the inside.
11. Maggie Walsh
I wouldn’t volunteer my unique gifts in service to any government or Frankenstein any military a bio-mechanical demonoid super-soldier. I wouldn’t name him Adam like I’m a god and then turn my back on him long enough to be reminded I am in fact a mortal. Being reanimated doesn’t make you divine; it makes you a zombie with moderate brain activity who glosses the futility of attacking physically superior adversaries with a bone saw. Even underground, there comes a point where motive is meaningless and it just doesn’t matter who might’ve hurt you into accepting this position. I wouldn’t surveil people without their knowledge or dose them without their consent and I wouldn’t hold all the keys to too many locked doors. It doesn’t take a retina scan to identify whose side you’re on. I wouldn’t go by the codename of Mother or refer to breathing, walking, talking beings as Hostile Subterraneans, bloodsuckers though they may be. Above ground, I wouldn’t be teaching Intro to Psych like it’s a graduate seminar. I wouldn’t talk down to my students that way or be proud that they refer to me as the Evil Bitch-Monster of Death when they mistakenly believe I’m out of earshot. I’ll take the bitch with a side order of monster, but I will leave the evil and the death. There’s only one person here who seems like they could really benefit from a secret behavior modification chip implant, and I certainly wouldn’t have brunch with a fascist.
12. Tara Maclay
We are having breakfast to celebrate our birthdays, which are ten days apart. We are trying to do something other than meet up at the house or go to the usual spot because we are trying to make it special, trying to break away from the idea received from our shitty fathers that there is nothing in our birth worth celebrating. It takes a long time to decide on a place because Tara doesn’t care where we go as long as there are vegetarian options and I might look at fifty menus before going back to the second or third one to declare it the best choice. We end up across the street from the usual spot. She orders Greek yogurt overflowing with berries and I order a tofu scramble with a side of bacon, which makes her laugh. The plates land quickly, but even before this, our conversation is a vulture circling always back to many kinds of death. The dried-up herbs we use to make tea. The thing still wilting at the foot of the tree in the front yard, losing its battle against the weeds. A possum frozen by the dumpster when we turned the corner, but it was probably playing. A signal for the college station that has begun to fade away on our end of town. How the leaves fell early this year. How the cold will be late but lingering. And of course, another funeral on Friday. We doula for each other.
13. Dawn Summers
She was born in the same year as my sister and I have to keep reminding myself that she isn't my sister because my sister and I remain estranged. Her absence is deeply felt and it will never be like she was never here. This Little Bit is a force of nature that could destroy our earthly dimension in less than the time it takes to brew our morning coffee. It's a truth that cannot stay buried behind even the tallest stack of pancakes, no matter my proficiency with flips. She is understandably somewhat sad and increasingly confused about the key of her singular existence, so she steals from everyone and hurts herself to feel alive like the many normal people she has met but will never be. We both befriend vampires for our separate reasons that all amount to our mutual sense of personal destiny and how close it sometimes seems to myriad prospects for doom. Over and over I invoke refusal, tell myself she has her own agency and my fight cannot be confined to just one individual entity. It isn't my job to save her or even watch her, but the memory of our blood tie scratches at my screen door like a hungry puppy, asking how much of myself I might despite everything still sacrifice on her behalf. All I know is it's never too late, yet while I've waited for years, the gang saw how I ate at a table for one.
14. Glory
She shifted into so many shapes. In awe of each new animal, I forgot she briefly transformed into a pink and purple alligator that instantly imprinted on my aura the way no dragon that ever tried it could. Glory gleefully burnt the toast to a crisp while I poured the smokiest lapsang souchong I could find, the tea going tepid between us as we growled and howled together in the half-light coming through the hole in the roof. Between the violence of her violet and the magic of her magenta, between the lies we told each other and the rules we made to break, love grew like dandelions in concrete cracks. Every time she noticed it, the killer rose and smote it, and the irony of all these withering things is how she grew by them so that she was then the loveliest flower in the room. Except of course for me, though she refused to admit I was depended on for tea. And so I grew, too. A pair of true narcissus, those heady, opulent, floral animalics. A few green nuances with hints of tobacco or hay, nurturing each other in our mutual shade. She once put poison in my cup and told me so after I drained it, then of course she found I’d switched with hers and laughed so hard before she fainted. But among all these tricks, neither of us ever once touched a broomstick. Perhaps we did know the danger after all, that fine line between intimacy and intimidation. We withheld the formal invitation to a duel.
15. Amy Madison
Any time I’m thinking about dumpster diving, I’m thinking about Amy. There are rats all over this town, and a rat is a rat is a rat. Rats will eat anything when they’re on the run, or if they’re caged up in a dorm room, then they’ll eat whatever they’re given. Rats share Amy’s fundamentally junkie mentality, where everything is just catch as catch can and get it while it’s hot. Yet none can live on broth alone. People say she should’ve known better, or that she was done in by her dealer, or they blame her single mother, and even when all that is true, Amy still chose to cast a big nasty every time instead of plunging to the cure at rock bottom. Her story has this messed up kind of hope nesting in it, and as she unspools her testimony over a sixer of Diet Coke and eight bags of cold microwave popcorn, not a single sob passes between us. Amy doesn’t want charity, just to make her own choices, free from the impulse to please other people or any other abuses masquerading as the pressure of civilized living. Amy was feral as a human and then silent as a rat, truly no one’s ally but her own. Everyone knows that with great power comes great responsibility, so maybe it is better to be a villainous witch than no witch at all, or maybe it’s better to be a rat than burnt at the stake.
16. Sineya
She is somewhere after death, sacrificing, and I am somewhere before it, also sacrificing. Africa and California are not that different in their demands. There is a telephone somewhere out here in the desert, ringing out questions in forms we are loathe to answer. We have no friends, are serious. We do not like cheese, are out of time having stepped out of it. We eat the jing and qi of our infinite kills, but never their shen. Our shen already beats with the same heart as the demon. This makes us wise and brave and reclusive and clairvoyant, and also foolish and crazy and savage and blind. We are unwatched but far from unarmed. You have seen the wide swipe of our scythe in your dreams. Every river is only blood. There is sand from the past in our mouths while we speak its future into the present. Death is our gift, but it is not for you to open. Our kind can only open our good guidance for each other. We do not sell tickets. We do not meet groups. We are two of only one, an antagonistic mathematics in a long line of women. Only women. Not lonely, forever lineage. We defeated the first evil and the last of the old ones, watching the hellmouth open and close, open and close. We save our sisters over and over and the world again. It is fine to fear us, and this is what it means to be chosen.
Megan Volpert is author or editor of over a dozen books on popular culture, including two Lambda Literary Award finalists and an American Library Association honoree. Her newest work is Why Alanis Morissette Matters (University of Texas Press, 2025), and she won Georgia Author of the Year for Boss Broad (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). In addition to her integrative medicine practice, Volpert's other gigs include: Core Faculty in the MFA Writing program at Reinhardt University, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University, and Fellow at the American Institute for Philosophical and Cultural Thought.