The story begins with Clyde, a vampire, sitting in Santa Francesca’s Lemon Grove, an Italian lemon farm that’s too expensive for locals and sustained by tourist money. Clyde says, “In every season you can find me sitting at my bench, watching them fall. Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I’ve been sitting here so long their falls seem contiguous, close as raindrops” (3). Clyde’s wife, Magreb, is annoyed with the close attention that he gives to lemon watching.

When describing himself, Clyde says, “Most people mistake me for a small, kindly Italian grandfather, a nonno. I have an old nonno’s coloring, the dark walnut stain peculiar to southern Italians, a tan that won’t fade until I die (which I never will)” (3). Clyde sits on a bench in the lemon grove day after day, and the tourists that visit assume he’s “a widower, or an old man who has survived his children. They never guess that [he’s] a vampire” (3).

Fila, a teenage girl who works at the grove, “knows that [Clyde is] a monster. Sometimes she’ll smile vacantly in my direction, but she never gives me any trouble. And because of her benevolent indifference to me, I feel a swell of love for the girl” (4).

In the evening, the tourists at the lemon grove watch the “I Pipistrelli Impazziti—the descent of the bats. They flow from the cliffs that glow like pale chalk, expelled from caves in seeming billions. Their drop is steep and vertical, a black hail” (5). Clyde notes that the bats have teeth like his. His wife, Magreb, can shapeshift between a bat and a vampire. When Clyde watches the bats descend from the cave, he is always filled with anxiety thinking that Magreb, in her bat form, will get swept away by the wind and pushed into the cliffs.

Magreb flies from the cliff and joins Clyde in the grove. They each grab a lemon and “swing them to our faces. We plunge our fangs, piercing the skin, and emit a long, united hiss: ‘Aaah!’” (7). Instead of drinking blood, they have discovered that sucking on lemons momentarily numbs their otherwise painful and insatiable thirst. This is why Clyde lives in the lemon grove; the couple had previously “tried everything—fangs in apples, fangs in rubber balls. We lived everywhere: Tunis, Laos, Cincinnati, Salamanca,” but only the lemons work (7).

In his early years, Clyde used to feast on human blood to quench his thirst. He says that he only drank blood back then because “[v]ampires were the favorite undead of the Enlightenment, and as a young boy I aped the diction and mannerisms I read about in books” (8). He used to feed on people of all ages, but he was always proud of himself that he never touched the littlest children.

Magreb, unlike Clyde, has never drank human blood. They first met in a cemetery. Clyde had been stalking Magreb, but when they first interacted he realized she was a vampire, too:

Magreb was the first and only other vampire I’d ever met. We bared fangs over a tombstone and recognized each other. There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over (9).

Magreb opens Clyde’s eyes to the truth of being a vampire. She asks him, “So, when did you figure out that the blood does nothing? […] Didn’t you think it suspicious that you had a heartbeat? […] That you had a reflection in water?” (10). This blows Clyde’s mind. He says, “Those initial days with Magreb nearly undid me” (10). For so long, he had been living by what he thought vampires should do, rather than understanding his own nature. He stopped drinking blood and stopped sleeping in a coffin, but for a very long time he was unable to go into the sun without believing he would die.

Clyde remembers that the first thirty years with Magreb were a “very confusing period. Mostly I felt grateful, aboveground feelings. I was in love. For a vampire, my life was very normal. Instead of stalking prostitutes, I went on long bicycle rides with Magreb” (12). Living in the sun changed his skin color from pale white to “the color of milky coffee” (12). While Clyde is mostly happy, he also sometimes thinks that Magreb ruined his life because she changed everything he once thought to be true: “To correct for her power over my mind I tried to fantasize about mortal women, their wild eyes and bare swan necks; I couldn’t do it, not anymore—an eternity of vague female smiles eclipsed by Magreb’s tiny razor fangs” (12).

After living a relatively happy thirty years together, “without any preamble, Magreb flew up to the caves. She called over her furry, muscled shoulder that she just wanted to sleep for a while” (14). Clyde had wanted to follow her that first time, but he couldn’t shapeshift into a bat anymore.

Fila and Clyde are alone in the grove. She thinks he looks thirsty and pours him some lemonade. She tells him that he reminds her of her “nonno,” and he studies her collarbone and feels “like a threat again” (15). That night, he goes on a “rampage,” sucking on the last rotten lemons of the season. They are “soft with rot, mildewed, sun-shriveled, blackened. Lemon skin bulging with tiny cellophane-green worms. Dirt smells, rain smells, all swirled through with the tart sting of decay” (15). Magreb comes in the morning and sees the mess, but she doesn’t say anything. Clyde tries to distract her by saying he’s come up with an Italian name, “Brandolino” (15). He thinks “[o]ur names are relics of the places we’ve been,” and he feels like a failure for hanging on to the name Clyde for so long (15). He chose the name Clyde during the California Gold Rush, and he chose it because it was innocuous enough that people “might get a malt beer with [Clyde] or follow [him] into the woods” (16).

After sucking on a lemon, Magreb says that they’re not working anymore. Clyde thinks, “But the lemons have never worked. At best, they give us eight hours of peace. We aren’t talking about the lemons” (16). She says they should leave the grove, but Clyde doesn’t want to. In attempt to appease Magreb, Clyde takes her on a date the following evening. They go see a “vampire movie set in the Dust Bowl. Magreb expects a comedy, but the Dracula actor fills [Clyde] with the sadness of an old photo album” (18). The film gets frozen, and everyone begins to leave before it’s over. He asks Magreb to stay in the theatre with him, but she leaves and retreats to her cave.

Clyde says, “Outside I see Fila standing in a clot of her friends, lit by the marquee” (19). Her friends leave, and Clyde finds himself alone with her: “She smells like hard water and glycerin. The hum of her young life all around me makes it difficult to think” (20). Suddenly, he is behind a dumpster with her, and his hand seems to be tightening around her wrist, as if beyond his will. Before he knows it, her “head lolls against [Clyde’s] shoulder like a sleepy child’s, then swings forward in a rag-doll circle. The starlight is white mercury compared to her blotted-out eyes” (20). He pulls the funicular keys out of her pocket and puts her body in the dumpster.

Back at the grove, Clyde rides the funicular up to the caves to look for Magreb. He walks “beneath a chandelier of furry bodies, heartbeats wrapped in wings the color of rose petals or corn silk. Breath ripples through each of them, a tiny life in its translucent envelope (21). He searches for Magreb and wonders if she has left him for good; he worries that he’ll “never find another vampire” (21).

Without finding Magreb, he begins to take the funicular back down the mountain. But the funicular car is caught in the wind and swings back and forth like a pendulum. He nearly crashes into the side of the mountain and “[w]ith a lurch of surprise, [Clyde] realize[s] that [he] could die” (22). He wonders if Magreb is watching him and what she sees from her upside-down vantage point. Does she see the line of the funicular “snap, the glass box plummet?” (22). He imagines that Magreb:

feels something growing inside her, a dreadful suspicion. It is solid, this new thing, it is the opposite of hunger. She’s emerging from a dream of distant thunder, rumbling and loose. Something has happened tonight that she thought was impossible. In the morning, she will want to tell me about it (22).