That night Mina comes into the house, moaning. Her mother grabs her arm and says, \u201cWhat\u2019s this on your neck?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe bit me!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWho bit you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat widow Dalila\u2019s son.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy would he bite you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t lie to me!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not lying, Mama!\u201d<\/p>\n
Her mother strikes her across the face.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy are you meeting him in the night?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWho said I\u2019m meeting him?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cStop lying, Mina!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to milk the cow! And he rushed at me out of the dark and went for my neck like an animal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her mother strikes her again. \u201cYou\u2019re a lying harlot! You\u2019re lucky your father\u2019s not home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later, when they are sitting quietly in the room near the fire, the mother says, \u201cYou of all I carried in my eye\u2014no longer my little child, no longer my little girl.\u201d<\/p>\n
She tells her she is to put a veil on whenever she goes out of doors from now on.<\/p>\n
The girl cries all night.<\/p>\n
Word spreads through the village of Mina\u2019s trysts with Dalila\u2019s son.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Next day the mother goes down into the lower village and comes to widow Dalila\u2019s house. Poor woman is honoured to receive her. She is told her son has defiled a much-loved daughter.<\/p>\n
She cannot believe her son is kissing a fourteen-year-old girl.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour son will have to marry her.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMarry? He is only twenty.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI was fifteen when I was married! Your son has ruined her. This way he can make it right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dalila praises the lord, kisses the hands of Mina\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Mina won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll be a dead bride,\u201d the girl says.<\/p>\n
Everything is set to happen as planned, when, one day, word comes that her betrothed has bitten a young boy in another village.<\/p>\n
Mina\u2019s mother collapses on the floor. She kisses her girl\u2019s feet, begs forgiveness, says she knew it all along her Mina wouldn\u2019t have lied.<\/p>\n
That was sixty years ago. We don\u2019t 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\u2019t even remember his real name anymore.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He loves music so much he harasses people.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you hear that?\u201d he\u2019ll say. \u201cDo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
He doesn\u2019t think anyone can hear what he hears.<\/p>\n
Yes, he loves music.<\/p>\n
And he loves Van Gogh. The sadness and the posthumous triumph of the thing.<\/p>\n
He loves rhubarb tart and raspberry jam.<\/p>\n
As a child, he actually loved animals.<\/p>\n
He yields his spot\u00a0in the checkout line.<\/p>\n
“Don’t mention it,” he’ll say.<\/p>\n
He waves to people.<\/p>\n
\u201cManners,\u201d his neighbors say between themselves. \u201cYou can tell he comes from a good family.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cBury me in a place like that,\u201d he\u2019ll say, a romantic, in his way.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t even know why he does it. Something about the look in their eyes. Buries them along those lovely stretches of road.<\/p>\n
He is still young, his whole life ahead of him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019t even remember his real name anymore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3176],"class_list":["post-18693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-serial-killers-third-person-nature","writer-elvis-bego"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18693"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19443,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18693\/revisions\/19443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}