I shifted in my seat sweating and uncomfortably exposed as if everyone could see my thoughts. I felt the preacher’s eyes upon me, weighing my worth, ordering me. I felt Mary’s eyes upon me wide with horror at my actions. It seemed as if every eye was upon me and they all knew that I had shot my mother and they all condemned me. My breath came in ragged ineffectual gasps, my chest heaving. The world began to spin around me. I got to my feet sending a ripple of gasps and murmurs through the congregation. The preacher momentarily lost his impeccable flow as I squeezed out of the pew avoiding eye contact with anyone and then walked briskly down the aisle though I felt the world swaying around me. Once outside I took a deep breath of the cooler air and looked around. Not seeing anyone I began walking towards a copse of trees lining the riverbank.
The calm of the birds, the trees and the river soon cleared my head though it wasn’t long before I caught a glimpse of a vampire across the river furtively watching me. I didn’t see him again, but I had no doubt that he was still watching me, only more carefully. Despite the surveillance I sat for some time with my back against a tree watching the bird’s flit from branch to branch and the waters passively begin their long journey to the sea. By the time I headed back to the village it was afternoon and I felt no desire to interact with humans or vampire so I made my way quickly back towards the shack I’d been given to sleep in, pausing only to pet a yellow dog that walked beside me with its tongue hanging out. I ducked into the cabin and was shocked to find Mary pacing the small dirt floor. My cabin mate was nowhere to be found. As soon as she saw me, even before I could say anything, she threw herself into me and wrapped her arms around me.
“You worried me,” she said.
“What,” I blurted.
“You just ran out of the church, then you were nowhere to be found in the camp and you didn’t even show up for lunch.” She looked up at me with such warmth in her eyes that I immediately started sobbing. Huge warm tears rushed down my face and fell onto her shoulder. It was her turn to be flabbergasted and her face turned to a frightened tenderness.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I miss my mother,” I said. “She could have been here. We could have been together. It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault.” She guided me over to my cot and sat down beside me with one arm around me.
“I miss my mother too,” she said. “I’m sure it’s not your fault. How could it be your fault.”
Blinded by tears, the world shrank to the warmth of her body pressed against mine and her soft voice. She took my hand and held it in her lap and slowly my sobs subsided. Then I began to tell her about my mother. She sat quietly listening rubbing the back of my hand with her thumb and squeezing me gently from time to time when my sobs reemerged. I don’t remember everything I must have told her because the words spewed forth uncontrollably in a fevered remembrance and atonement which had never been voiced since I’d shot my mother but I remember that I told her one tale which seemed to embody my mother. When I told it, my voice was distorted by sobs and by my hysteria, but Mary listened and asked me to go on whenever I faltered.
“She was always there for me.” I said. “She always took care of me. When I was about five or six and my brother, Benjamin, was three I was briefly separated from my mother. A man, I don’t recall his name, had been tagging along with us, but as they all eventually did, he left my mother and us to survive on our own. It made no difference to me, but my mother often longed for men or women of her own age. We trekked through the woods quietly, scavenging from the houses that potted the landscape. We’d come upon a particularly plentiful find, a large kitchen pantry full to the brim in a house that had escaped the savages of the crazy years and the weather unscathed. My mother had been extremely tired, so we remained in the house for close to a week, eating cans of fruit and potted meat and drinking from a stream nearby while she rested from some illness that neither my brother or I had caught. It was a rare respite from the constant flight that was our life, digging in the stream, listening to the birds chirping, and watching deer creeping through the forest. The world and vampires had briefly forgotten us, but it wasn’t to last. I was out at the stream flipping over rocks and watching the orange salamanders startled by the sudden light slip away when I heard the rustle of leaves. I immediately tensed and crouched down scanning half lit shadows under the trees for the sound’s origin. Nothing moved apart from the delicate spinning of dust motes through the yellow light. The world and I stood petrified for a long moment, my eyes flitting back and forth, my ears straining to hear the slightest crackle of crushed leaves over the thumping of my heart and my neck moving slowly and smoothly as I turned
