Once Bitten: A
Vampire’s Lament
by Maureen Mancini Amaturo
To think I was afraid of the dark once. Now,
darkness is my life. Life? Am I dead? Undead? To what
world do I belong? To walk in the sun. To taste the food
of the earth. To see myself in a mirror. I envy the men
who must live with the burden of facing themselves in the
mirror. Horror that I am, I can never look myself in the
eye. How cruel. Or is it? Perhaps, it’s better my image
remains hidden from my own eyes. I know what I am,
what I have become. I need not see to know the truth.
I stand dead with life in view around me. Each
night, while I roam in shadows, carriages continue over
cobbled roads carrying revelers to cotillions, friends to
feasts, lovers to starlit fields. I watch, obscured, as
gentlemen take their ladies’ hands and guide them from
velvet coaches, down one step, then two, their joy as
sweeping as the billowing gowns that seem to float over
mossy paths. I watch to see if she is there, if my love will
emerge on the arm of another now that I have been
wrenched from the world we once shared. That will come,
that will come, she is vibrant with an angel’s face, and I, a
doomed witness, will suffer her betterment. On this night,
again, she is not there among the callers and visitors, but
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