October 2026 - Vol. 23, Issue 5

In the beginning, everybody wants to be a vampire.

When the government announces the sun’s abnormally rapid trajectory towards the Earth’s surface, everybody is told to become a vampire. Switch to sleeping during the day, and if you can’t, just stay inside. No more business hours in daylight. No more sending your kids out to play in the summer sun. We don’t know what it’ll do to them yet. If you must go out during the day, bring an acrylic umbrella, and remain outside for no longer than fifteen minutes. The temperature is rising every single day.

Everybody promises to become a vampire until they can figure it out. Until they can fix this.

You, afflicted with the vampire’s curse since the age of fourteen, revel in this. None of your life is disrupted; you already lived this way for the longest. How strange, cliched, maybe, that the world’s looming destruction should provide a vampire comfort. But your red eyes can’t help but sparkle, seeing how alive the nights become. Where once silence ruled a twelve-hour blackout, the music of others now sings. Packed streets where once you stalked alone, music where once your own hissing provided your downtown soundtrack. People saying to each other, “Man, this is crazy, right? Right? Guess the night’s not so bad.”

Today you stop by a café at three in the morning, called “The Sunny-Side Up Café”. As you walk in the girl behind the counter is, ironically, discussing a name change with her manager, who is smoking cigarettes all over the stand mixers in the back.

“But I still think that things’re gonna get better. They have to!” the girl’s sweet voice cracks at the edges like puff pastry. “Besides, how many “end of the world” events have we had by now? It’s never really the end. I mean, remember 2012?”

The smoking man scoffs. “Sure, sure. But, I dunno. Doesn’t it feel weird now? The name. ‘Sunny-side up’. Might as well be calling ourselves ‘The Gun and Poison Café’, come in please.”

“What’s weird about having hope? I swear, you’re so—”

The girl suddenly looks up as she notices you lurking in front of the counter. The lurking. Even though it’s normal to be out at night now, you still haven’t quite gotten rid of the lurking. You had a tendency to be naturally invisible even when you were right in front of someone.

“Oh, sorry! My bad, welcome in! What can I do for you today— tonight?”

You realize you don’t know what to say. You’re still not used to people talking to you. Your mouth hangs open, revealing the teeny white tips of your fangs. But the girl doesn’t persecute you, doesn’t immediately call for help and try to drive a stake through your heart. She, the unused to being lonely, is just too happy to see another person again.

She smiles her sunny-side up smile. “You need a recommendation of what’s good here?”

You nod quickly, hoping this is the correct thing to do at a café.

The girl pretends to think for a moment, though it’s clear she already has an answer. “You look tired, sugar. How about trying one of our coffee scones?”

“That sounds… good,” you say, trying to talk around the sharp teeth in your mouth, realizing you don’t normally do this, talk.

“Awesome!” the girl says, and then grabs a pair of tongs out of the smoke infused room behind her.

You rustle around in your long black cape to find the pouch you keep your credit card in. The girl sees you doing it and you get nervous, only for her to speak.

“Oh, you don’t need to pay. It’s on the house.”

Blinking. “Really?” Arms stuck at weird angles inside your cape.

Burningly bright kindness. “’Course. Everyone’s got enough trouble these days already, don’t ’cha think?”

She hands you your scone in a small pink square of paper. You bow as you accept it and walk out of the shop, into the bustling night. You gently lift the paper off the scone, afraid to crush it, and take a bite. There’s no blood in the Sunny-Side Up Café’s kitchen, of course, so it tastes like nothing to you. But the kindness, the belief in you by another person, untainted by fear— it turns it into sweet ashes in your mouth.

# # #

Everyone wants to be a vampire, for a while.

Imminent death breeds innovation; breeds sales. Every company and its mother company scrambles to create the next “sunless experience”, that is to say, sell you something in the dark they normally would in the light.

On the street you used to prowl, a kind of night-time waterpark has been constructed. Slides and diving boards and pools of cool moon water. A giant artificial sun hangs off the tallest spired control building, inches below the American flag. The sun is made of smoothly welded copper with a hundred tiny heat lamps embedded in it. It’s made to look like a child’s drawing of the sun, except perfect. To not remember what really hangs above.

As it’s on your usual route anyways, the park becomes your hotspot for victims. Swimsuits, exposed necks and shoulders. You have a favorite broom closet to hide in and pull people into as they walk past the bathrooms. Earth-ending event or not, you still have to eat.

Today you reach a grey clawed hand out of your door and snag a bearded middle-aged man on his way to the bathroom. Hissing, you drag him into your closet with you only to discover that he brings with him luminance.

Plastered across his eyes ridiculously: bulky round goggles lined with LEDs on the inside. Blasting his corneas with light. Nothing that can hurt you, of course. It's all so artificial. Sick of constant dilation. Forcing constriction because they miss it. There's a designer sunglass brand logo on the side.

The man stares up at you. Too much of the color of his eyes is visible. He’s forcing the light to make him appear fearless. But his lip is trembling, wiggling the pathetic, scraggly hairs that dance atop it. You would burst out laughing if he didn't make you so sad. Sad because he can’t get over the sun. Even though you had to teach yourself, practically force yourself not to miss it three hundred years ago. That’s right, it took you one hundred years to stop missing the sun. That means they’ll never get over it. Don’t live long enough to.

Out of pity or something else you won't ever understand, you sink your teeth into his thick neck, but can only bring yourself to drink a cup of his blood. It tastes like it's missing something, silent blood, devoid of sweetness and instead gamey, wildly unpleasant.

You stare into his false eyes. "Just go." Licking blood off the dry corner of your lips.

You push him out of the closet before he can thank you or scream. You even forget to hypnotize him into forgetting you. He won't say anything, anyways. He's so desperate for an experience to call his own.

# # #

Everyone wants to be a vampire until they get tired of it.

"Acrylic umbrellas too heavy to carry out every day? Try a paper alternative!"

The TV news, your only source for the morning, coughs out blasphemy after blasphemy. You don't know when but people started going out again. If you’ve learned one thing over your four-hundred years, it’s that humans don’t believe things until they see them, like they always say, like they always said about you. And they don't see the sun falling out of the sky fast enough.

Never mind the melting sensation in the soles of your boots for the first hour after dark. Never mind the charred remains of songbirds on the sidewalk, their ribs UV ray melted through so that their tiny hearts are there, now seen, to decay where no one bothers to notice. "It doesn't look like it's moved an inch, does it?” The nights are getting lonely again. The shops you thought you might do something as dangerous as “frequent” are returning to day hours. Because ultimately it pays more to be normal.

You're running along the downtown strip, speed masking your presence, making your body no more than a fragment in the air. Stumbling over your own feet, burning your thighs into overdrive. Running a little too much like a human for someone of your age.

“The Sunny-Side Up Café”. The ornately lettered sign hangs over the small building like the other shoe, waiting to drop. Your body slams against the glass windows, making no reflection but still making a close-to-breaking thud. The girl, the one that was kind to you, starts up from the table she was wiping down and stares at you. You stare back, hungry, not for food.

“Hey there,” she says, awkwardly loud to make sure her voice is heard through the glass. “Sorry, we’re closed. We’re back open at seven though, so I’ll see you in the morning?”

You can’t. She smiles unceasing. How to say it to her? That you can’t, you can’t, you can’t, you won’t, and it’s not fair. No matter how early in the night you get there the doors are always closed. It was stupid to try anyways. Why did you try? Because you guess you do that now, miss things that you didn’t even like.

You dejectedly turn from the window, swooping your cape over your elbow, when suddenly the worst pain you’ve ever experienced hits you, like hot nails shoved into your ears, like drops of magma needle-injected into your eyeballs. You let out a horrible shriek and try to cower into your cape more.

A few feet away from you is a large group, maybe a family. Around their necks, suspended from leather ropes, hang balls of pure sunlight. Smaller than a palm of a hand but killing you. Around the space where their necklaces hang, their clothes have had holes burned in them, and the skin beneath almost glows with burn. Scaled over and red, they’re smiling and laughing.

“Why?” you have to bite your own fang down on your lip to keep from screaming fully. “What are those that you are wearing?”

An elderly man, oldest of the group, turns to face you with a strange twisted expression that you can barely see through the sunspots that haunt you. “Ah, these? Why, they’re protection, of course. Sourced from Mount Everest, where you can grab some’a the sun if ya get up high enough.”

“We wear them to make the sun happy! That way, it won’t fall on us, right, daddy?” a little girl’s voice is speaking. You can’t see her at all because the light of her sun obscures her entire body.

“That’s right, sweetie. Do you want one?” the father asks you. “We’ve got a few extras to sell.”

The pain of the heat in your ears is now generating a low pitched chiming sound. You want to scream at the man, at the men, at the little girl, for taking the night away from you. The only thing you always had. But you’re going to die if you do. Instead of answering you take off running again, shuddering in relief when the coolness of movement hits you.

The sun was meant to be worshiped back when you couldn’t touch it. It’s wrong, almost patronizing to do it now, when it lies on its stellar death bed. Accept it. How to accept it. That you are going to have to live with the sun for longer than any of the people that don't believe in it.

# # #

Nobody wants to be a vampire anymore.

“We can’t live like this forever, right?”

The sun is so close that the clouds all died. The blue of the sky during the day is now just light, terrible, unforgiving, nothing light. Everyone lives in that light now. Never mind that the hospitals are filled with victims of a new kind of heat stroke, one that entombs a body in an undefeated heat, teeth melting in mouths and lungs catching on fire. Even if this is the last month alive, nobody is willing to live it in fear.

Grass is just yellow now. Every fish is dead. Are you watching these things happen over months, or years, or centuries? And does it matter. You’ve been trapped in your lair for weeks, afraid to do what you’re supposed to. You haven’t been able to drink blood from a fresh victim in a long time, because a while ago when you did, their veins were poisoned by sunlight. What felt like an undercover operation to get rid of you disguised as simply “living”. Living until they die because they’re not the ones that will have to deal with it until the end of time. All of your organs tried to burn themselves alive and you barely made it out.

One day the sun doesn’t go down.

Rotting on your marble floor. Lifting your head up with effort to see dull brightness threatening softly behind your blackout curtains. With a groan you flip onto your back to pull your golden pocket watch out of your waistcoat. The stomach you keep for blood is so empty you can feel it squirming around inside you. Your dizzy eyes finally focus enough to look at the hands of the clock.

It’s eleven at night and the sun won’t leave you alone. It’s eleven at night and something finally breaks inside you, whether it’s the hunger or the desire to leave. You pull yourself up using a white acrylic umbrella as a cane, its tip digging into the marble, the last sound. You shakily walk out the castle’s double iron gates and leave them open.

The heat sinks into your body as you raise the heavy umbrella in defense. Maybe it will always be a part of you, now. As you make your way through the forest, you’re already breathing too much. Vision blinking in and out between the burning white and the zero blackness. You look down at the ground, the darkest place there is anymore. The bodies of what used to be nocturnal creatures, poor and confused, line your feet. You pick up the limp body of a large raccoon, heavy with unadaptable blood, and suck it all out of him. It tastes disgustingly half alive, but you can see a little better now. You continue on this way as long as the canopy of trees provides some natural shade. You continue, taking your life from dead animals because people hate you too much. Squirrels. Magpies. Even mosquitoes. Every drop of blood a last resort, a silent “I’m sorry”.

You exit the forest and are now struck by the sun. Squinting to the point of near-blindness despite the umbrella’s protection. It’s so close. It’s so close it doesn’t make sense. And you know where you have to go.

You start climbing, climbing anything that takes you up. You pass tourists going for a nature walk who scream at the different colors of blood running down your cheeks. You can hardly hear them over the hum of the sun, the sickening flat note that’s always been at the base of your skull, now too loud to ignore. You climb so high up that your umbrella starts chipping apart, unable to withstand the heat any longer. You throw it away, letting it fill itself with cracks on the rocks. You catch dead eagles and hawks and vultures, the birds that lasted finally falling out of the sky, and drink them too. Anything to let you live for a moment longer. You can hardly feel your flesh burning even though you know it’s happening. Is it that you just don’t care? Or more that you’re used to it.

You reach your destination and half of your bones are hanging out of your skin. You stand atop the tallest mountain you know of. What used to be flat dirt to stand on has been crisped up into sand, and the tree where once you sat with a lover is now withered and dead, having caught on fire from proximity long ago. You use the crater where your carved initials have melted away as a foothold and climb the dying tree until you can’t go any higher.

Here, the sun is right above your head. You can reach out and touch it, the way everyone seems to want to. Up close, the sun is innocent. It is nothing. It knows nothing of the hope people place on it, nor anything of the millions it has killed before it ever started falling. It doesn’t even understand what a person is. And you love the sun, now, as it starts melting your first rib. You love it for unknowingly giving up on mankind.

You love it so much you stretch your neck up and bite down on the sun. Impossible fire consumes your soul and everything that you are, but you don’t die. You hold on to the sun, two hands around its neck that it doesn’t have, for intimacy. Blood starts pouring out of your fangs, the blood, the blood on their hands of all the lives you could have lived. It fills up the whiteness of the sun, colors all of its light in dark red destroying, cold heat and warm blood sensations in a headlock. You hold on and give it your feelings until the star becomes too heavy and falls.

All of the people in the city below are imprinted in a single collective silhouette in a single collective moment before the sun crashes into the planet. You see them individually and together all at once. All of them who wanted to live forever, reduced to only this moment.

And then everything explodes. And then darkness. And after darkness, still, you. Alive.