Nanowrimo - 2

Folklorists of all ages would be so disappointed if they knew the truth. Generations have romanticized and nursed a spicy mix of lust and fear around beings with neither shadow nor reflection, whose front canines protrude from their mouths like sabers, who sleep in coffins by day and roam the night looking for the blood of innocents. We are supposed to be in possession of superhuman strength and loath crosses. We are alleged to possess the ability to shape shift into flying animals. They insist they may kill us with a stake through the heart. The world over legends prevail of evil ones preying upon our fellows that we might drink their blood. Animated dead, never died, in league with the devil, we are the one piece of nasty ancient tales which will just never succumb to reason. Just like the golden god, the strong hero, or the fragile maiden, we persist in the mind like an imprint from the furthest back people.

All of this says less about us than about those many generations terribly willing to find something, someone, some being outside of themselves upon which to hang all of their hopes and fears. It takes out so much of the responsibility for life. It neatly removes all the messy facts of owning up for one’s circumstances.

We are real. We do exist, but never in such a capacity as to deserve this horrific credit for death and mayhem. Here as with so many myths, a grain of truth has fallen into the soil of weak spirits and sprouted a forest of lies.

I scan the dark night outside the window. Not so much as a bird returns my call for a single companion. Who else would be awake at this hour? Plenty. Plenty stand over the crib of a baby that won’t sleep or stare into the abyss of their own future, numb with worry. There’s plenty at 4 am to go around.

We came out only at night simply to avoid the horrors of day. It was in the daytime that our senses, heightened with ages of observation, were routinely assaulted by the ghoulish antics of the short-lived ones. They live for such a short amount of time yet cannot seem to avoid eagerly sending each other on to an early grave. Often this was over such foolishness that one could feel one’s heart break.

I stood among crowds loud with cheer as heads toppled from quivering bodies. Monarchs great and small proceeded with stoic dignity to the public platform. It was no secret to them what would happen next. The blood filled basket was there. The blade was raised with its single, red-stained canal going up the middle. Some prayed. Some cried. They all went a little stiff with the knowledge that this mortal experience was about to end. Some fought. I remember her, the lady that fought and screamed with every ounce of her love of life. I could watch no more after this.

I’ve walked through fetid cities tight with bodies and whose streets ran with excrement. By day you had to watch that no one tossed the bog out the window at you. By day you could see children starving while kings and priests grew fat. I would see heaven’s mercy dangled before the helpless and starving under the ruse of preconditions. Churches robbing and taxing the helpless. And every day you’d see bodies emerge from houses, newly dead from senseless disease. You watch the latest enemy of the king observe his own entrails as the executioner held them forth for all to see. Over and over again those who would not conform would live in fear and die gripping their ropes in agony.

I remember Judith, a bright woman of twenty-three. She had been handed off into marriage with a merchant of most unmannerly behavior. Her face was fair enough to attract his attention and her indebted parents were eager to move her on. And the match seemed to suit her well enough. That is, until it did not. She watched three infant children die. Her merchant husband took to the pot far too well and often flew into such a rage that he beat her cruelly. Judith, with her boundless intelligence, refused to be treated thus and began to rebel against his mistreatment. She called public attention to the shame of her husband’s behavior. The result, after what one might construe as a trial, though certainly not a fair one, was her public execution for being a witch. She was in no league with the devil, only her own senses. It is for such reasons we seek the night. Night dims the harsh edges. In sleep, all people appear helpless and gentle.

It galls me to no end that mortals have had the nerve to call us monsters through the ages. Let’s pile the bodies and see who is really guilty! The masses who used to fear the executioners tools of trade or the clanging fields of battle have always come to worry over new weapons. Musket balls, bullets, cannon, poisonous gasses, bombs – bombs especially have kept more than one generation in solid fear of “those other people”. And now we have peace in this country. The war is over there somewhere, ripping up another country’s citizenry and we can cuddle up behind our oceans, safe. But the killing continues. I look out upon the black fields that a few decades ago would have been planted over in a protective layer of winter clover. They’re black and empty as monoculture farming has taken everything from the barnyard that is not corn or soybeans. By day ammonium nitrate is spread in excess upon this ground. And the foul run-off that pollutes the water ways and has created a dead zone in the ocean to which it drains is the remnants of weapons manufactured for World War II. Mortals seem bound and determined to fight their own future at every turn.

Yet, we are the monsters. Another lie.

Refocusing, my eyes come back to the glass, to the white face hanging in front of me, my reflection. According to legend, I’m not supposed to have that, either. But I have a body, just as the next mortal, and there is no denying the laws of physics. Light bouncing against an entity and hitting a reflective surface will produce a reflection. Not even Yeshua ben David, the man history has come to call “Jesus” defied natural laws. Not according to Zoltan. I met Zoltan just after realizing my first feed and abandoning the mortal life. I was seeking – I don’t know what. Perhaps, being young, I was simply running, hoping that if I traveled far enough that this exquisite thirst would leave my person. It was Zoltan who found me, recognized me, and took me in. He had lived since ancient Babylon and, being one easily seduced by life’s shiny things, he had amassed the most amazing collection of artifacts and craftsmanship one has ever seen. What I saw of Persia, Greece and Rome within his Paris home was but a taste of the goods he had stored away. Various caves and buried cells around the Europe and the Holy Land would yield even more treasures.

Zoltan would speak of Yeshua often, sometimes going into Aramaic to make his point and pausing to say “Ah! But the essence doesn’t translate!” In the gospel according to Zoltan there was significantly less hocus pocus miracle pie to the earthly works of Yeshua than the modern gospels have left us to believe. It was more or less mostly just happy coincidence. Which, in a world traveling as slowly as did occupied Palestine, is a miracle unto itself.

“Everything moved about by donkeys and ox and wagon! Or worse, walking. We walked everywhere! UGH! Weeks it could take to travel where it now takes us just days to go! So the feeding of the five thousand – you’ve heard of this miracle, yes? And now everyone thinks the man Jesus broke up a loaf of bread and voilá! Baskets and baskets of food for all to eat! Ridiculous. Yeshua, he was no magician. He was just, well, attractive. Well it’s true, he just seemed to attract attention wherever he went and when he needed something it just showed up. And on that day all these hungry people were sitting about listening to him talk. The man didn’t wish to have a riot of hungry people, not with the Romans breathing down everyone’s neck. Well, this merchant from a nearby town sent out wagons of food. And as soon as the blessing was done – there they were! We unloaded the wagons and ate of fish, bread, figs and olives so big you could eat them like an apple! Very tasty. But not magic. And speaking of attracting could he ever draw women! Ah! I tell it was not just in Jerusalem where he spent time in the ‘holiest of holies’! ha haaaaaaaaa!”

Ah Zoltan. I dearly miss him. He went far toward explaining much to me of my nature, that I was no more ‘made’ into a vampire than someone waived a baton over my head and “made” me into a woman. “Vampire! What a horrid term!” he would scoff. “Once born” was growing in fashion as the euphemism to describe us. Once born, we walked the earth with mortals, watching generations of them come and go like waves across the sand. Each generation thinks of itself as making a fresh reach into the realms of love, beauty, war and justice. Yet each simply repeats the same sigh as those who came before.

He spent patient decades with me, explaining lore and sharing tales from time before memory. I in turn spent many an afternoon with my jaw dropped open listening to the adventures of Zoltan through the empires of history. I was to be his last protégé. In the end his caves and castles full of ancient artifacts and his mind full of mysteries weren’t enough. Once borns were more and more fleeing Europe’s cramped climes for the space and anarchist abandon of the colonies. He was lonely. Zoltan had been around the sun hundreds and hundreds of times and one day simply told me “Little sister, I am quite tired.” He died the way so many once borns die. Suicide. It takes several decades, some say almost a hundred years, for the suicide to work properly. The only way out of our life is simply to not feed, to resist the thirst to drink life’s blood, for a very, very long time.

In the glass I see my face, hanging like the white flag of surrender, in the night window. We don’t lack a reflection at all. By contrast in our reflection we see our true nature revealed. In mine I see the ghost I am becoming as years stretch between me and my last feed. How long has it been? Thirty years? I think Carter was president. It took Zoltan over eighty to die. Eighty long years in which he was forced to suddenly feel age in his long hale and hearty physique and during which he had to teach me how to feed myself. And now? After one has watched enough generations of humans come crashing over the beaches of time, they do worse than look the same. They bleed together. Today’s mistakes begin breeding yesterday’s consequences. All of the wars and all of the victors become a tangled mess of weeds cast about by time. I’ve been around the sun hundreds of times, my brothers and sisters, and I am simply quite tired.