Wow.

I'm sorry I missed it.

wtf

You humans are nuts.

Nick and I were at Marley Station this evening. It's not the mall it once was, but sometimes we stroll through for some vampiric sense of nostalgia. We enjoy the rush of emotion around the holiday season, and nowhere can we experience such diversity of feeling as in a mall in December.

We were strolling through JC Penney to get to the parking lot.

There was a family taking a picture.

A Christmas picture.

They moved some store signs away from the Christmas trees.

And posed.

And a blonde woman took several pictures.

Now, I am never one to criticize humans for taking an opportunity, but for some reason this struck me as ironic. A false holiday scene with false happiness. I could clearly feel the irritation, the boredom, the embarrassment, of the individuals.

Fascinating. I'll never understand it.

But fascinating.

Hijacked

Jesus, Chris, I never realized I had a sister.

Blah, blah, blah.

First snow

I love standing in the middle of a forest when snow falls, listening as it alights on trees, and dead leaves. It's almost as if you can hear the air turning crystalline. Maybe humans can't hear this; I wouldn't know.

It's harder now to find the silence. Sandwiched between Baltimore and Washington as we are, the traffic and industrial plants have made it nearly impossible. I miss the times when we could travel a mile and be completely isolated. Now I feel there is no distance I could go to find solitude.

Last night I settled for sitting in the woods behind the house, letting the snow collect in my hands, watching it melt. The snowfall was brief, but as the first snow of the season, still something to be cher

Gabriel, I see you reading over my shoul

Computers suck

We weren't born in this century. We weren't even born in the last one. While we've adapted to novelties like moveable type, we have a hard time with technology. I can't fix a computer. It's a miracle that I can fix the car, really. Our hard drive crashed just after halloween, and we've been without a computer since then. Since a computer is a new thing for us -- relatively -- we weren't motivated to fix it.

So we just bought a new one. Michael Dell, here's sixteen hundred dollars.

We're back.

Bring on the slaughter

All right, I'm sure it's no surprise that, being vampires, we sleep during the day. The sun doesn't burn us, but we're nocturnal. That part's not a myth. Just like humans who stay up all night, if we have to stay up all day, we get cranky. When we get cranky, we want to kill things. Or at least I do.

Sometimes we need humans to do things for us. Humans, generally, live in the day. So if we need something done by a human, say, we need our windshield repaired by the SafeLite Glass people, or whatever the hell their names are, we need to stay up during the day.

I drew the short straw, so now I'm waiting while everyone else sleeps. Why the hell they give you a "time window" is beyond me. Does it look like it's between eight in the morning and noon? I should be sound asleep right now. Instead I'm watching a crappy movie from fifteen years ago because there's not a goddamn thing on television, imagining how I'm going to rip the guy limb from limb when he gets here.

After he replaces the windshield.

So I don't have to go through this again.

Finally

The cold weather is coming. You know how at night, you can smell someone having a fire? It's different now from how it used to be. Duraflame logs carry a vastly different scent than timber or leaves, but it's still a smell that seems to herald the change in seasons. We like the cold.

I, personally, can't wait for snow.

Diversions

We miss a lot of human rites of passage.

High school, for instance. We don't understand high school references, because we have no experience on which to draw. We can fake it, of course. But we don't really know what we're talking about, aside from shows like Beverly Hills 90210 (don't judge) or Friday Night Lights. Considering that we know how little television accurately reflects real life, we know that's not the best source of knowledge.

We do, however, have a lot of spare time on our hands.

Gabriel and Nicholas like to play games with people. They most recently invented a challenge where they find a policeman, and they bet each other who can get his gun away first.

Michael likes to track. He used to follow people, see whom they met, their interests, their problems. Since he gave up on humans, he does the same with animals. He'll track for hours. He can spend an entire night following one animal before feeding.

I like to understand mysterious people. Not necessarily the stereotypical mysterious people who might dress in black and skulk around. Mysterious in that I can't figure out their actions. This happens often. As I've said, we can manage the human facade quite well. People don't typically "make" us for vampires. But unlike my brothers, I like to understand the reasoning behind the actions.

Today I'm puzzled as to why high school students were clustered on the corner of Light and Pratt, heckling workers as they headed home. The students were dressed in all black, ripped clothes, the common rebellious attire common in teenagers, but well spoken. They acted like hoodlums, flicking cigarettes, cursing, and shoving.

I only watched them for an hour, but I'm still confused by the spectacle.

We don't generally approach children, but if they're there tomorrow, I might have to make an exception.

I'm curious.

Checkmate

I killed a man over a chess game once.

My brothers will tell you I don't have a temper. With a brother like Gabriel, one learns tolerance quickly. But I can be provoked.

When we came to the United States, we struggled for acceptance, and worked to blend in, but small reminders of home were welcome respites. I met an old German soldier living in a boarding house in southern Georgia. I walked past their house each day when I was taking classes at the University. I can't remember his name, but I remember his face vividly. He would sit on his daughter's porch with a glass of lemonade every afternoon, staring at an empty chess board. This was well after the Depression, when people still did such things.

When I could feel his loneliness even from the road, I climbed the steps and asked him, in perfect English, why he did not play.

When he responded in German, explaining that he did not speak English, I knew I would come back. We were all desperate for the familiar. The next day I returned with my own pieces, and challenged him to a game. I learned that his pieces had been stolen during his trip to America, and he had no money to replace them. I was more than happy to share mine. They had been a gift from my father, and they were one of the few things I had kept with me when we left.

We played every day for weeks. He told stories about the first world war, thinking I was too young to have experienced the politics and battling, though of course we had been in the thick of it.

Though he was old, he was perceptive. He recognized something was different about me, and I should have stopped coming. I realize now that I thrived on the intellectual competition of the game, and I didn't want to relinquish this small daily ritual that reminded me of home.

I must have grown too comfortable with the old man. I stopped simply listening to his stories, and started sharing my own.

I felt it. When he started growing suspicious, I knew. We always know. I tried to stifle it, but his mistrust was established.

He stood to leave the game. I knew it would be the last time we played.

Then he swept my pieces into his bag. Said someone like me who would trick an old man didn't deserve to have them.

You can imagine how that talk ended, I'm sure.

Early. Late. It's all relative.

This is my favorite time of night. We love the dark, but it's dark at many other times at night, too, so that really has nothing to do with it. There's something about the quality of the air before 5am. Even the most determined humans are generally asleep by now. Some are just rising for the day, but even their movements are hushed and purposeful, as if they, too, have respect for this time of day.

Michael doesn't hunt humans, so sometimes if he goes out late, I'll go with him. I haven't done this in a while. Last night we ran clear to the Potomac. He doesn't have much to say, and makes a good hunting partner. Even at 4am, the humidity pressed down like a blanket. Once we were filthy and full, we waited by the water's edge, looking for the sun to come up. We'd done this many times when I was very young, after our parents died and I was too small to take care of myself. Doing this now allowed me to pretend, for a short time, that I was small and vulnerable again, and that my sole comfort in life was that my brother could protect me.

At that time of night, it was easy to forget our fighting.

But then sunrise came, and we had to come back to the house.

When the phone rang at eight, he answered, though he knew it was for me. Rebecca. Her call, though welcome, yanked us out of our peaceful past and into our angry present.