Vanessa

It’s sprawled across the front page of the Briarwood Gazette: “Vampires Occupy Old Town Hall Building.”

“Nothing but old wives’ tales,” Mark winks at her as he refolds the paper, reminding Vanessa that she might be one of the oldest wives in town. “But living in that dump—that’s different!”

Vanessa never forgets to count her blessings. She and Mark are still mostly healthy, mostly coherent, slowly turning into each other’s memory bank as friends, communities, institutions and even the hometown of their youth ebb into the sea of time. Every evening, they take walks around the neighborhood with Rahma, the sweet Somali woman who works as their caretaker. This vampire ruckus has stopped the walks, so they’re watching TV in the living room, while the house fills with the aroma of the meatloaf Rahma is baking.

This recipe is an old family secret, but Vanessa no longer cooks. Gatekeeping recipes makes no sense in a world where no two neighboring households eat the same diet. Unlike many of their generation, Vanessa and Mark have enjoyed the changing face of Briarwood. They never had the opportunity to travel the world, but today they could meet the whole world in their hometown.

Rahma’s little daughter sits with them, playing games on an old tablet. It hasn’t been safe to send the kid to school ever since the working-class neighborhood of Eastville was vandalized, the mobs accusing the refugees of being vampires.

Vanessa remembers when the only vampires were rich white boys. In the mid-century Briarwood College was an elite private institution perched atop the hill that overlooked the town. Few locals went to Briarwood College, with its prohibitive tuition and unwelcoming atmosphere. It was where the wealthiest dynasties in the country disposed of their most delinquent sons, the ones too embarrassing to send to the Ivy Leagues.  

The college boys drove to town in their Ferraris and Aston Martins, all floppy hair and bright white smiles. The mothers of all the teenage girls of Briarwood warned them about those boys. None of them were going to stick around after college, and none would sweep you away into the glitzy, dreamlike high society that he’d descended from, no matter his silver-tongued lies. Guys from Briarwood College didn’t marry small-town girls; they married each other’s sisters. And worse, some of them were vampires.

A vampire didn’t merely take your heart, virginity, or blood. Nor did they turn you into vampires; vampirism was genetically inherited or bestowed through a complex ritual. If a vampire sucked you dry, you simply died. Every year Briarwood registered a few deaths by acute bloodlessness. Death wasn’t the only outcome: those who lived after having a blood vessel opened by vampire teeth were rendered unable to procreate. It was incurable, irreversible. Vampirism was the highest blood privilege, and its bearers safeguarded it to the very last drop.

Everyone in Briarwood knew these things in the 1960s and 1970s, yet they were never officially acknowledged. No city record, police report, news article, or death certificate ever mentioned “vampire.” In 1994 UoM acquired the declining Briarwood College, as the old-money brats had expanded their options in life. Even as the local youth kept moving elsewhere for better opportunities, the town was filling up with new people—chain-store employees, refugees from Vietnam and Somalia, middle-class families displaced from bigger cities by gentrification, and finally, a vibrant student population at the newly opened UoM campus. Nobody talked about vampires. Vanessa herself has rarely thought of them in the past couple decades.

It occurs to her that with her generation, the infamous Briarwood College vampires have almost passed out of collective memory. People spreading these latest rumors—vile excuses to attack the poor, the minorities, even the liberals—may’ve never heard of them.  

“People always use the symbolism of the monster to project the fear of the ‘other,’ right?” Mark sighs. “In our day we believed the upper classes were sucking the blood of the average American, but these days every Average Joe is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. The 1% are their gods and saviors, so homeless squatters must be vampires.”

Vanessa always enjoys his little pedantic rants, but she has to object. “But vampires aren’t symbolism! We’ve all seen them.”

“You mean the vampires that went to Briarwood College back in the day? Got them some liberal arts degrees?” Mark’s dentures rattle with laughter. “To be fair, I didn’t mind that rumor at the time. Gave us local boys a chance with the cuties like you.”

Three children and seven grandchildren later, there are still things Mark says that make Vanessa’s heart flutter. But not this evening, as her brain explodes with a flashback to Tricia, her best friend, frozen stiff and paperwhite in a ditch by Interstate-90 on a winter dawn. Her lips a frosty, sickening purple, not a drop of blood in her body. No human, however depraved, could’ve done that.

It could’ve been Vanessa in that ditch. The evening before she’d stayed home to finish some homework, but the two girls had spent months talking to two guys from Briarwood College. They’d sneak out of school, and their boyfriends would drive them to Frankie’s Roadhouse outside town. Vanessa and Tricia felt like adults, sipping milkshakes while the guys chugged Coca-Cola from cans. Theo and Robbie were sweet, intellectual, respectful. Nothing like the vampires of their moms’ cautionary tales.

Here’s what the town’s mothers didn’t understand about the Briarwood College boys: who really were these sons so insufferable their wealthy parents exiled them? Theo had been organizing Vietnam War protests in his family’s generational hometown in Massachusetts. Robbie, plantation scion from Virginia, had filed to marry his “colored” girlfriend as soon as the Racial Integrity Act was lifted. Both eloquently quoted everything from Marx to Ginsberg, Martin Luther King Jr. to Bob Dylan. Behind the bespoke clothes and fancy cars, the Briarwood College guys were rebels, anti-capitalists, activists, poets, visionaries.

And here’s what the town’s daughters didn’t understand: That didn’t improve their chances with those men. Nor did it preclude them from being vampires.

Had she never told Mark of this part of her life? It slowly dawns on Vanessa that there’s no one left to confirm her gruesome memory. Her parents, Tricia’s parents, classmates, schoolteachers, rescue workers, policemen, journalists—everyone from those days is gone. City records show Patricia Holloway, age fifteen, died of hypothermia and bloodlessness on December 9, 1970. Neither boyfriend was investigated, despite Vanessa’s persistence. Instead, she was sent to the shrink and put on Valium for six months.

So today Vanessa sits alive with her husband of forty-two years, who’s believed his entire life that vampires are “old wives’ tales.” Schoolgirls weren’t the only ones who died of bloodlessness in those days. What were the men of Briarwood—the brothers, classmates, future husbands growing up alongside the girls—told about those rampant deaths and inexplicable rise in infertility? Did their mothers, slowly losing their minds inside the kitchens of suburban America, smoking cigarette after cigarette as the meatloaves baked, invent the vampires? Or did Vanessa’s own mind concoct them from the fog of all these decades?

Briarwood College still stands, surrounded by newer UoM buildings, now housing the campus’s prestigious School of International Affairs. Everything in the world is younger than Vanessa now, everything more unfamiliar by the day. Even her husband’s face feels unfamiliar tonight. They’ve lived long, what feels like an eternity on a vampire-ridden earth. She’s sure this too shall pass.