A Sanguinary Rose (Complete)

When I woke up, tears were rolling down my cheeks and dribbling on my clavicle.

Why am I crying?

A deep sense of loss made my stomach churn, and a lump in my throat to form. Something dear was lost to me. I propped myself against my pillow and watched beams of sunlight slant through my shutters, blurry from the flow of regretful tears.

I looked in the mirror, trying to delve deeper into my mind. Had it been it real? But like all dreams, the more I tried to remember, the more it seemed to slip away. Details washed away in the tide of time with each passing second until even the bigger picture was nothing but a fuzzy mess. There was a sudden flash of revelation in my mind, and I ran my thumb over my upper row of teeth. Nothing out of the ordinary. I remembered having pointed fangs.

The dream was fading, the image dissolving, the names falling out of memory, and my heart was broken. But I couldn’t put my finger on why. The tears still flowed. As I wiped my face clean, I looked at my red, puffy eyes and vowed to not forget the dream. But how could I keep such a promise?

There was something I remembered about sunlight being harmful to my body. I ran to the window and drew wide open the shutters to stand under its warm light. Nothing happened. The heat caressed my skin like the touch of a mother. It was the worst thing that could’ve happened at that moment.

Days melted into each other and became unrecognizable from one another. Nothing ever stood out. Like the rapid flipping of a book’s pages, I felt my life pass me by. I sat at breakfast, remembering the day I woke up from that fever dream, but how long had it been since then? A year? Three? More?

School resumed being the same monotonous process every day of the year. Teachers droned on for hours until the end of their lecture. The students’ faces I passed in the hallways between classes became blurs and indistinguishable from all the others. Mr. Howard berated me for staring out the window throughout history class. He did that every day. In chemistry, Mr. Langdon gave me an F on the quiz. I may have spent the entire lesson gawking at the first question.

“—?” “——— like to talk after class?” Mr. Langdon said, crouching beside my desk.

“Hm. I didn’t catch that.”

He arched his eyebrows with concern, and I thought he repeated himself. “?”

“I’m missing something. I don’t know. What am I doing here? I shouldn’t be here.”

“—?”

I yanked my bag from the floor. “What’s the point of all of this?” Rows and columns of faceless students drew their judgment in a wave of snickering. I stormed out of the class.

At lunch I sat with my friends. At least I thought that’s what they were. Their daily banter sometimes included me, sometimes it didn’t. I couldn’t care less. Why am I here?

“————,” Rick said, raising his hands over his head, laughing all the while. “!”

“———!” Jason burst out in laughter, hands on his stomach. “.”

“——lett. Hey, can’t you hear me?” Amanda said, waving her hand at me. “You okay?”

“Are we friends?”

“Of course, silly.” But her cloy smile made me more distrustful. “Why do you say that?”

Tiffany bobbed her head lazily in agreement. Lying bitch. She’ll cut ties for no reason.

Biting down on my lip, I tasted blood. “You’re not them.” Peering around me, I tried to find them. Who’s them?

“Who’s them?” Amanda asked, frowning. I couldn’t tell whether she was mocking me. I wanted to yell at her. “Are you sure you’re okay? Where’s that coming from?”

Who’s them? I left them behind.

They, them, their were the only three words I could use the few times I could glimpse their ‘existence.’

“Yeah, what the hell was that about?” Tiffany said, twisting her lips in a mix of confusion and teasing.

I wanted to retort. But the words got caught in my throat. My face was burning up. My gaze was transfixed on the floor, fried chips strewn on the tile floor and chewed gum stuck under the table.

I was strong.

I was fast.

I was brave.

I am nothing now.

There’s no one here for me. My purpose… I am lost.

But I remembered taking pictures with ‘them.’ I had their numbers, their friendship on social media. There had to be at least one photo in my phone’s drive to prove their existence.

My cell phone nearly flew out of my pocket when I took it out. I thumbed the digital scanner and clicked on my pictures’ app. I swiped quickly through my collections of photographs. Family pictures, selfies with Tiffany and Amanda, landscape shots, a picture with Rick making gross faces in it. I must have been losing my mind. They had to be there. I swiped left to right, right to left, from start to finish, and from end to beginning. I went through my entire history of texting. What I remembered was nonexistent.

“———, you okay?” Rick asked me. I didn’t realize I had been sobbing my eyes out.

Days merged into days, and weeks into weeks, and they all became indistinguishable from one another and utterly interchangeable. School was a loud buzz of white noise in the morning. Time at home a quiet beep in the far corners of my mind.

Dad slammed his palm on his desk. There was at least that small change.

“This isn’t how we raised you,” Dad yelled, the lines on his brow deepening. He held at arm’s length my report card. Notes in red were scribbled on a corner. “To be some kind of ———? —————? , —————!” I watched the clouds through the window drift across the sky as his voice became static noise in the back of my mind.

“Baby, will you talk to me, please?” Mom’s eyes were red and tear stains ran down her cheeks. She knelt beside me by the desk. The pencil between my fingers scratched the paper to finish the crude drawing of a towering man in a trench coat. “I know we have precious little time together, but we can’t keep growing apart like this. Your silence, your… detachedness is driving me crazy. What’s happ————? ——, —————.”

“I left them behind, Mom… I can’t forgive myself for that.”

“Whom did you leave behind? What do you mean, baby?”

Even as I tried to recall, a knot in my throat threatened to choke the words. “I cry myself to sleep and I can’t even remember their names.”

Mom was caressing my arm. “Would you like to talk to somebody about it? Maybe to a counselor?”

I gritted my teeth. “You do not understand. I don’t want to talk to anybody about it. I want to go back.” My chest heaved. “I can’t go back. Even in dreams, I can’t.”

“—————.”

“Yes.”

“————. ————?”

“Yeah.”

“——lett, baby! Tell me about them. Would that make you happy?” Mom sat at the edge of my bed and wiped the tear streaks off her face. “Who are they?”

“They are… fun, caring, loyal, genuine. The best friends I could ask for. A bright flame where there’s only darkness.” Tears fell on my drawing. The pencil strokes smudged out. The man in the trench coat became an unrecognizable stain of a Rorschach design; it may have been grinning, like a Cheshire Cat. “Always there for me and I for them through thick and thin. They made every day worth living again. I’d move mountains and skies for them. If I had the strength.”

Mom’s eyes were welling up again.

“But you do.” She reached out and held my hands. “Strength is what you decide to do with it. It’s how far you’re willing to go for what you love. It is the bravery to stand up for yourself and what you believe in. It is in your spirit and determination, and it’s on you to move mountains and skies for what you believe is right.”

“They will see me, hear me, point at me…”

Mom leaned in closer. “Which ‘they’ are you talking about now?”

“Everyone else.”

Mom smiled a sad smile through her perfect teeth. “Who cares about them, baby? No one else matters. Their words are leaves in a storm. Let the wind carry them and drown them out. They will talk, they will see, and they will judge. And I ask you again? Who cares? You have no reason to suppress yourself for whatever others might think. Let them live in their own little world and live free in your own. Love yourself as you are, and you will find the strength.”

The vampire does not make me. I make the vampire.

The vivid image of my mom sitting before me in my bedroom got slashed into strips of shadow. As darkness engulfed the room, I realized that none of it had been real. I’d known the answer for a long time now. I didn’t want the cure. Becoming a vampire had been the greatest gift I’d been given in my life. I’d cherish it and use it for good.

It is mine.

I wasn’t alone out here among the stars though. With these lenses on, it was almost impossible to tell the distance apart. But it was enough to make out the figure’s outline before the moving islands of darkness and waves of stars and meteors washing over. As I stared, details came alive.

Ahead of me stood Mandala, towering like a bull, a grin of triumph distorting his face, and pressed over his eyes, a device like my own, scrying far and deep into the Starlit Almanac, into the infinite knowledge of the Universe and the Cosmos.