The Making of a Vampire

How it begins

Anna wanders around at night. Her full name, Reanima, was given to her by a grandmother who perhaps liked Rianna or Rihanna. Reanna has always reminded her of something dead that was brought back to life. Not like Rianna, or Rihanna. Or even Breanna.

No, her name is closer to… reanimate.  

No one knows if her grandmother got it from first Americans, African-Americans. something at the cabaret—or if she had read Octavia Butler’s Fledgling or Toni Morrison’s Beloved one too many times.

But anyway, now, these days, Anna thinks she is a vampire. Because it seems that, each night, she can float through the trees. She shimmies with the leaves. She is misty. But she is not missed.

She is not missed because no one notices much of the activity around the Perivale Home in Suffolk, Virginia. Even to the nurses, therapists, cooks, and janitors, it is already fading, opaque, nearly invisible. People rarely visit.

The dark blues of tree trunks sit in the woods. At night they form sounds like bats that have yet to leave their caves in search of blood. The waiting leaves tremble like a stripper shimmying and working for the mighty dollar bill in some low-down, hold-down, pants-down club at the back of alleyway somewhere near a forgotten Starbucks.

Anna knows this is where she must travel to meet the others. They are the spirits of her childhood. The ones that danced around the tree. The dark blues forming like little mice waiting for hungry bats. These bats have tasted blood and left smears on the tree trunks.

Anna reaches to touch them. Taps her fingers lightly across her lips.

She licks.

Tastes.

Swallows.

The infection spreads through her body. She returns to the unlocked back door of the Perivale Home, having consumed poisoned bark, leaf and blood. In the misty moonlight she roams the corridors, testing doors.

Hoping to find that same taste among her fellow residents.