Vampire

That night Mina comes into the house, moaning. Her mother grabs her arm and says, “What’s this on your neck?”

“He bit me!”

“Who bit you?”

“That widow Dalila’s son.”

“Why would he bite you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me!”

“I’m not lying, Mama!”

Her mother strikes her across the face.

“Why are you meeting him in the night?”

“Who said I’m meeting him?”

“Stop lying, Mina!”

“I went to milk the cow! And he rushed at me out of the dark and went for my neck like an animal.”

Her mother strikes her again. “You’re a lying harlot! You’re lucky your father’s not home.”

Later, when they are sitting quietly in the room near the fire, the mother says, “You of all I carried in my eye—no longer my little child, no longer my little girl.”

She tells her she is to put a veil on whenever she goes out of doors from now on.

The girl cries all night.

Word spreads through the village of Mina’s trysts with Dalila’s son.

 

Next day the mother goes down into the lower village and comes to widow Dalila’s house. Poor woman is honoured to receive her. She is told her son has defiled a much-loved daughter.

She cannot believe her son is kissing a fourteen-year-old girl.

“Your son will have to marry her.”

“Marry? He is only twenty.”

“I was fifteen when I was married! Your son has ruined her. This way he can make it right.”

Dalila praises the lord, kisses the hands of Mina’s mother. She thought the boy was hopeless. He really is a strange boy, she knows, never says much, no inclination for work of any kind, but he is good-natured and maybe marriage is just the thing to make him make something of himself.

Mina won’t be consoled. She pleads with her brothers to believe her. Nobody does. It is clear that Mina must have seduced him. She is much livelier, cleverer than him. Her mother tells her to prepare for the wedding.

“I’ll be a dead bride,” the girl says.

Everything is set to happen as planned, when, one day, word comes that her betrothed has bitten a young boy in another village.

Mina’s mother collapses on the floor. She kisses her girl’s feet, begs forgiveness, says she knew it all along her Mina wouldn’t have lied.

That was sixty years ago. We don’t think he ever bit anyone again after he was released from prison, but we call him Vampire anyway, in the way we do here in the hills when you let us peer into the dark, unswept corner of your soul. We don’t even remember his real name anymore.

 

Things He Loves

He loves music so much he harasses people.

“Do you hear that?” he’ll say. “Do you hear how she bends the note here? Hold on, the best part is coming, when it changes to minor, listen, now, no, not yet, now! Listen. It kills me.”

He doesn’t think anyone can hear what he hears.

Yes, he loves music.

And he loves Van Gogh. The sadness and the posthumous triumph of the thing.

He loves rhubarb tart and raspberry jam.

As a child, he actually loved animals.

He yields his spot in the checkout line.

“Don’t mention it,” he’ll say.

He waves to people.

“Manners,” his neighbors say between themselves. “You can tell he comes from a good family.”

He loves certain desolate stretches of road with thistle growing on the side, and sea lavender, and bulrushes that stick to your clothes, arid earth below. “Bury me in a place like that,” he’ll say, a romantic, in his way.

Everybody likes him. And, of course, nobody knows what he most loves to do. He has this special room. He takes his time. He doesn’t even know why he does it. Something about the look in their eyes. Buries them along those lovely stretches of road.

He is still young, his whole life ahead of him.