Tip of the Tongue

I was born under unfortunate circumstances. My mother, a young girl of sixteen at the time, two years younger than I am now, was raped. Nine months later, I came into this world with no idea why the world hated me. It didn’t take me long to find out the problem. Not only was I the child of a rapist, my father, a man who vanished the night I was...conceived, was a vampire.

My mother survived childbirth without any wounds. But I was underdeveloped. My body was too weak to support itself and for the first three hours of my life, I was a motionless corpse. Somehow, by a miracle or by a curse, I didn’t die. I was stunted. My fangs are half the size they should be and I’m weaker than any normal vampire. I can’t hunt because of it, can’t run fast enough to save my life from humans and can’t catch a rabbit if I even tried. My food comes from a plastic bag, donated graciously by the hospital, though I doubt anyone in the hospital likes feeding a vampire. It would be easier to learn to shoot or use a bow but owning any kind of weapon was illegal.

It’s hard to see my fangs, though I could never pass as a human. My complexion isn’t hard to disguise behind my naturally dark skin. The only thing besides my fangs that can give me away is my strangely golden eyes. Eye color varied among vampires. Colors ranged from bright red to muted purple, but they were all unnatural to humans.

The law set in place by Queen, the country I was born and raised in, had abolished the killing of vampires 100 years ago, right after the Human and Vampire War. The Hunter Society that held raids and public burnings of vampires dissolved, but the laws couldn’t stop the ideas and beliefs passed from generation to generation. I was used to hearing sly remarks by kids and adults alike whether they were talking about what blood flowed through my veins or about my father.

That was the hardest thing to ignore. I’m nothing like my father, but my thoughts are never spoken. I never defend myself because the harder I fight against my restraints, the tighter they get.

I’m in class, prisoner inside these walls where I can’t escape the horrible truth spoken in everyone eyes. I can feel their stares burning into me as I sit with my head down, my eyes focused on the empty note page. The words in the textbook aren’t registering. My thoughts are blinding me to what is going on around me, except I can’t force those stares to fade into the background. I try to shift my mind to the lecture Mr. Kale is giving, something about the vampire military and what they did at some fort in the first half of the year. There’s nothing I care about in what he’s saying. I’ve heard it all before. Vampires did this and killed these people. Humans struck back and won against the horrible vampires.

My mind is to the point of being numbed by all the talk when a wad of paper flies across my desk. The wad hits the white brick wall and falls to the floor. I look at it, waiting for something to come crawling out of it, like a message or a sign about what is going to happen. Nothing happens. As should have been expected. But I’m a hopeful person. I dream of things happening, impossible things that only torture me in the end. I’m waiting like a fool and I probably look like a dumb ass. They already think I’m a savage because of what I am. I’m only making it worst for myself by looking like a weirdo.

So, I turn my head, ignoring the paper. Another one sails over my head this time. It lands in the seat in front of me. The girl sitting in front of the empty desk looks over her shoulder at someone.

I don’t want to look, but my curious mind is dying to know who she’s looking at. They’re talking with their eyes, telling secrets. They’re talking about me without saying a word. The stares are intense. I feel like a bug under a microscope.

My blurred mind cleared and I could hear a bit of what Kale was talking about.

I never spoke up when Mr. Kale brought up the war. Throughout middle school, I’d learned it was better to keep my mouth shut. A few busted lips and a black eye later, I also learned it wasn’t enough to keep quiet. I had to be invisible. But that was harder to do when everyone went out of their way to notice me. And it wasn’t just about the color of my skin or how awkward I am in conversations. For years I was the kid who sat at the back of the class who may or may not be planning to slaughter the entire school. I’m still that kid to them. It was all about the type of blood flowing through my veins. It was about what my father was and the things he’d done to my mother.

I sat at the back again and watched Mr. Kale describe the gory details about the war. The kids around me didn’t blink, didn’t understand or care about the things Kale went on about. To them, this had nothing to do with them and never would. I could hear their thoughts just by looking at their faces. They were thinking about mindless teenage things. Things that concerned their own kind while I was on the outside worrying about staying alive.

But once in a while, their thoughts changed. They thought about me and my disgusting heritage.

I couldn’t change what had happened, couldn’t even start to fix the problems made centuries before I was born. It hurt though. What they said, what they thought, was all true.

My mother is human and my father was a vampire.

They hate me for it. They hate me for things that were never my fault. The saddest part was I kinda believed them. The lies they told were close to any truth only because there was never anything to dispute it. There wasn’t a day in which I didn’t hear about the evil things the vampires did. During the war, they’d killed millions for the sake of power, but humans had done the same. Only this war had been about keeping the human race from becoming extinct. Now that it was over, the death toll didn’t mean a thing except humans liked to use it as a way to keep vampires locked down. Vampires were dangerous. They were demons that fed on human victims.

That isn’t me. It never was.

“In 1824, a man by the name Joseph Mantel led the Vampire forces into the country once known as the United States. Can anyone tell me what this battle was?”

The room felt like it was closing in on me. Everyone knew the name Mantel. It was a stain on Diana, the town I’d called home since I was born. Everyone here was raised with that name drilled into their head and I could only assume it was laced with a powerful hate and disgust as to what Joseph Mantel represented. I couldn’t relate. My mom liked to talk about baking and sewing, not about politics and death. She barely talked about work most times because there wasn’t much she could tell me that didn’t involve how someone disliked what I was. Being a nurse for Diana Medical Research and Hospice helped when I relied so heavily on blood, but it let in a lot of death and hate that my mom couldn’t tolerate. She’d rather believe that it never happened at all than admit she had a son she couldn’t even take into town.

The name Mantel was a curse and an invite for trouble. The kin of Joseph Mantel lived out beyond the Crystal forest, close to the slopes of Crystal Mountain itself. They were full blooded vampires, the kind that had once ruled over Queen and its neighboring countries. No one knew what they looked like or if there were any at all, but no one was going to ask.

And it looked like no one was going to answer Mr. Kale’s question. Kale looked around the room and sighed. I thought he might roll his eyes as well.

“It was the battle of Judgment. Mantel and his men forced their way through the American border, slaughtering thousands. When he was finally captured, he was burned at the stake.”

A faint hush settled over the classroom. My heartbeat stuck in my throat. I had to fight to swallow. An odd ache formed at the pit of my stomach. I had this fear, a fear that I knew was stupid and just paranoia. The fear ate at me, turning each of my thoughts into a question. In my head, everyone was looking at me. They were waiting for me to lash out or to say something to give them a reason to beat me down. I wondered if that was all they expected from me. I wondered if they were just looking for the monster inside of me.

The end of school came around. Four o’clock. I sat out on the back steps of the building. Autumn had settled, leaving a chill in the air and dead leaves around my feet. The entire path leading from the forest to the front of the school was covered with leaves, piles of them that were masses of graveyards. I use to jump and play in them when I was younger, before I had to go to school. Before then, I’d never met another child outside seeing one when my mom and I went to the store. But after a woman yelled slurs at us, I was never allowed back. She, my mom, worried I would come out wrong if I was subjected to all that. I guess she was right. I wasn’t going to argue that I was more susceptible. However, I worried her over protectiveness had resulted in me not being able to speak with anyone in a normal manner. Social anxiety plagued me not once in a while, but all the time. It made school hard to bare and it was bad enough with the things kids were saying about me behind my back.

I just couldn’t pretend I didn’t give a shit like any normal teen. There was too much I was stressing over.

A group of kids walked out of the school. They glanced in my direction. I couldn’t tell if they’d seen me or they were looking past me to something in the forest. There could have been a killer sneaking up behind me and they wouldn’t tell me. I wouldn’t turn around anyway. The fear paralyzed me. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them.

They disappeared around the corner and into the parking lot. Their voices drifted in the wind, but my ears were shot. Another thing I could thank my birth for. It seemed I’d ended up with all the bad things of a vampire and nothing that could be slightly helpful. Vampires had otherworldly eyesight, they were fast, and stronger than anything. Their immune system sped up their healing and they could hear the slightest movement a mile away.

I’d been born with none of that. I couldn’t even really call myself a vampire, but everyone in Diana would never believe the truth. Half vampire was enough. Half savage was all they needed to prove I was a danger to society.

A few minutes passed by and the cold air bit through my chapped skin. I turned my hand over, examining the breaks and tears in the fragile skin. A large blue bruise formed around a knot above my knuckles. I’d fallen down yesterday. The steps to the front of our house needed to be repaired. The second steps was cracked and hung lower than it should be. Wooden steps were easy to fix. All I needed was a hammer and a nail. I would do it once I got home. It was just what I needed to take my mind off other unpleasant things.

Twenty minutes went by. It was a cautious habit I couldn’t break. Back in middle school, I’d been jumped and beaten. The kids were never found, never scolded, or punished. Instead, I was forced to stay home because I was an instigator for the kids. Since then, I can’t leave the school until I’m the last one.

The minutes rolled by until I decided it was time for me to head home. It would be another three hours before my mom was home from work and I didn’t know if she would be back by then. I couldn’t afford a phone, not when my mom is slaving away at the hospital just so we can keep the lights on. It wouldn’t be long before I would get my invitation to work at the Machines. The old cold mining facility was really the only place around here that would take on a vampire and give me a reasonable amount of cash every month. The under the table jobs were a waste of time and I wasn’t stupid enough for them to rip me off.

Still, there was a part of me that was hesitant to sign away my life to that dark place. There wasn’t anything else I could, but there was a strange sense of hope that my life would change to a different path. I knew what would happen once I moved towards the Machines and began working day and night for a hot meal and a cot to sleep in. Even if they gave me my own room and bath I knew I would never be happy there. That was the main reason why I hadn’t told my mom. She would lose her mind if she found out I was heading towards that place. It was up in the mountains, far away from any human civilization. I believed not even vampires lived there. The cold and wet place was full of black smoke and men who were on their last leg. She was completely in the right to want to kill me for even thinking about going there. But she had to understand the circumstanced.

I wasn’t going to live off her for the rest of my life. She’d put up with me for long enough.

The trail I took to my house took about thirty minutes from the school. It cut straight through the forest and followed a particular set of trees I’d marked in my own way. I thought it wouldn’t be noticeable if no one was looking, but I’d carved faint triangle on trees back when I started high school. It was another side effect from the beating, something that I couldn’t control, but it helped me when it grew colder and I couldn’t afford warm boots and a coat. The path led to a clearing outside my house. I’d needed the guidance back then, but I’d taken this path so many times I could walk along it with my eyes clothes.

No one came through the forest which was all the better for my conscious. Kids from school never even set a foot into the dark and gloomy set of trees. It was probably because they knew I took this route, that I lived not too far from here. They had cars and a house in town where they didn’t need the safety of fear to keep them alive. But where they saw horror in the darkness, I saw something beautiful. I couldn’t see how they couldn’t fall in love with the dying trees and the dark shadows moving through the fallen leaves. They thought I was crazy, insane, for wanting to immerse myself in a place that looked like it was home for demons. Perhaps they were right about that. I was here. I counted as a demon for them.

All I could see in the forest, where light died and darkness was born, was a strange beauty. There were prettier things in the world, but I found that beauty and pretty were vastly different. And the pretty things had died in the war. Maybe I could have agreed before the war and if I was human, that there was something off with this forest and the mountain that was miles ahead of it. I’d been raised in the middle of them both though and because of it I had a bias view of it all. Though it wasn’t fair to compare ugly beauty to perfect pretty, I saw it all as opinions that only mattered to one. And that was whoever was looking at them.

One reason, one that I hated even thinking about, as to why I loved the forest was the mixed blood in me. Being a vampire, I suppose, didn’t require that I love the dark and horror. I got more frightened than a cat most times. But I gravitated towards haunted items more than a few times in my life.

It was always in my best interest to keep a low profile. The beating in middle school was one reason why, the others were too long to list, but I had to fight with my mouth to keep quiet. Those times were odd, for me and for those I was speaking to because I never spoke. It wasn’t an exaggeration. Speaking was hard to do in the first place, a lot of times I couldn’t say a word to my mom, and it was only made worst when I had to speak to those I didn’t like. It hasn’t happened yet, me speaking out. Sometimes, I think up these scenarios. They usually involve someone, a student, a teacher, a random adult, who says a slur to me. And I don’t know why, but I’ll be the one to stand up to them. I’ll tell them off, say what I want and leave like I was on top of the world. They would be too stunned or too humiliated to do a thing. My mom would smile and hug me like I was a hero coming back from the war.

It was all a bunch of bullshit.

If that ever happened, I would be gutted, beaten, and killed in the middle of the street like trash. No one cared about a vampire. It would be like putting down a rabid dog.

I thought back to history class. I recalled the discussion about the Battle of Judgment and Joseph Mantel. The last name echoed in my mind. Mantel. I wondered what they did, if the Mantels were alive.

The path ended. My thoughts had led back and forth between the Mantels and other mindless wonders. The trees cleared away and as I stepped out into the clearing, I saw the side of my small blue house next to the smallest of rivers. Our water source was only just good enough for the toilet. Everything else had to be boiled. I thought it was unfair that we had to live like were back in the olden days, without clean running water to drink from, but it was just another sacrifice that I had to deal with. My mom should be the one complaining since it was her money paying for this place.

The house was just big enough to hold four people, thought it was only my mom and I living here now. My grandparents died before I was born and before my mom had turned seventeen. She rarely talked about them and I never had the courage to bring them up. Their photographs were left to the attic to collect dust. They never satisfied me. I wanted to ask questions, to get to know them like they were here now. But they were all I had. For now, was what I told myself. I would let the photos be the gateways to the grandparents I would never fully know. But only for now.

I entered the house with the key that hung from my neck. The choice wasn’t mine. Not at all. It was embarrassing to wear the key like I was reenacting a movie. Though, I’d lost the last three keys because I’d dropped them out of my pockets. Mom made sure I had it around my neck from now on.

The living room was covered in a blanket of silence except for the faint hum of the washer in the backroom. A slant of light spilled in from the kitchen doorway. My brows pulled down as I tried to comprehend who had left the light on and why the washer was still spinning. But my answers came as the shadow of a small woman formed on the tile flooring. I didn’t need to look up to picture my mom’s brown curly hair, her deep brown skin, and her small frame. When I pulled my eyes from her shadow, a smile broke across my face.

“Ren?”

I smiled as I walked through the doorway. “Expecting anyone else?”

My mom, Margaret Cornelli, turned with a laugh. “Who? Mrs. Inkman across town? She never stops talking about how the winter frost is going to kill her tulips.”

She sat the pot of noodles she was about the drain down.

“Serves her right after she threw that newspaper at me.”

She let out the loudest snort I’d ever heard. We busted out laughing. She swatted me with the towel in her hand. “Leave her alone. She’ll be gone before you know it.”

I looked at her with wide eyes. “And I’m the one being scolded! She should have thrown the paper at you!”

We laughed and the whole house shook with our loud chatter. If I had to ever leave this world, for whatever reason, I would want it to be like this. I would want to go peacefully, beside my mom, with the world a blur in the distance. We talked like there wasn’t a thing we had to worry about. Bills, racism, and the fear of the future were nothing to us in this moment. We lived like there wasn’t something lurking in our home, taking shelter in town. Neither of us wanted to admit we would never be safe while hate towards vampires lived on. Maybe we were hoping for change. I knew I was the type to wait for it to happen, not the type to go and fight for it. Ever since I was little I’d wished things would go back to the way they were before the war, but I never knew what it was like. It might have been worse.

From what the school books say, human ruled the earth and vampires had lived in the shadows. For thousands of years, their existence had gone unnoticed until they decided they wanted power. They wanted a piece of what the human had: freedom. Things had gone as they’d planned. Humans weren’t the sharing type and definitely not with a being that fed on blood which included human blood.

My fangs ached.

“I know that look,” Mom said. She made a face, but quickly hid it. “There should be some stored away in the cellar. I’ll get it.”

“No,” I said, my hand covering my mouth. “I can get it.”

Her gentle expression was too much for me. When the hunger got this bad, where it made my fangs throb, it took some restraint for me to not attack. It was a natural instinct, like the instinct for a cat to pounce on a moving object. But though I could fight it, I couldn’t help the burning flush on my face. I could never imagine what it would be like to be full blooded. I assumed without my ability to consume human food I would be paralyzed by the hunger. It was my fault I’d let myself get this hungry in the first place.

The stairs to the cellar creaked under my weight. As I descended into the darkness, my mind eased. I stepped off the final step and walked towards the center. I flicked on the light switch and scrunched my nose when dust floated under my nose from the shelves. I knew where the blood was. She kept it in the same place.

On the top shelf sat a metal box. I pulled it down with a gentle hand and opened it. Inside were glass bottles, sealed tight to keep it fresh. The bottles were more reliable than the pouches. It kept the blood fresh and made it easy for him to take to school. Labels with the expiration date and the blood type were taped to each bottle, written in my mom’s beautiful lettering.

I plucked a bottle from the box and carefully set it back on the shelf. I cracked it open and tossed it back. The blood hit the back of my throat. A shudder went through my body, electricity racing along my nerves. No matter how many times I took it, now matter how many times I tasted it, I could never get used to the feeling. It was my only high, the only thing that pulled me away from this horrible world besides Mom. But I hated it all the same.

It wore off in a matter of seconds. I could still feel the tingles in my fingertips.

I wondered what I would do if I pushed the limit of my hunger. I’d probably do anything for this feeling.

That thought sent a chill down my spine.