A Well Staring at the Sky: A Vampire

Read Part 9: A Death Foretold — Part 4

I told her I wanted to be a geisha and she told me I was going to be a vampire. It’s Halloween and this is the first year I am allowed to go trick or treating. Susan is taking me, but we cannot agree on what my costume will be.

I want to be pretty, I tell her. But she does not listen. She orders my mother to go to the costume store to buy me a cape. I can wear my Catholic school uniform of black dress pants and a white collared shirt. Now all I need is a cape and hair / makeup.

She wets a comb and brushes and gels my hair back. The water and gel make it look inky and stripped. I think I look like a dapper man from movies from the ’40s. She produces a book that is a step-by-step guide to doing costume makeup for Halloween. It even comes with the makeup that you need. I point to the cover with the little girl geisha on it, but Susan turns the page to the vampire section and proceeds to color my face white with black cheekbones, black under eyes, and a black widow’s peak. She colors my lips bright red and draws fangs off my bottom lip with vermillion blood dripping off of them. My mother returns with the cape and I pose for pictures waving my cape around me and looking deadly serious into the camera lens. She tells me this was the part I was born to play.

It’s a cold, dry October evening, unusual weather for a central Texas autumn. I don’t notice the cold as I go door-to-door, grabbing candy and trying to scare the adults that answer my exclamations of trick or treat. I am told on several occasions that I am a great vampire and one man gives me vampire teeth that fit like dentures into my mouth. In my mind this makes me an official vampire.

Susan let me stay out well past my bedtime and when we return home my mother berates her it being such a late hour. She and mom take off my makeup and run me a bath. As I play in the bathtub, I hear them talking about all the candy I had received. Even mom is impressed. As they pull me out of the bathtub and put my pajamas on Susan tells my mother that everyone thought I was the best vampire they had ever seen. She kisses me goodnight and says she knows I was the best vampire that ever lived.