Dawn at the Duck Pond

Twilight got a lot of things wrong about vampires. We don't sparkle. We don't lose our shit at the smell of sexy blood. We're certainly not equipped with unique little superpowers to match our personalities.

I'll get the axe if the others in my cadre hear me saying this, but honestly I'm glad that author got whimsy with her pen. Thanks to Ms Meyer, the rate of vampire speculation went through the roof. We vamps take care of ourselves and we certainly take care of the ones we turn. All that happened was the vampires who love to give the slip – the ones who pretended to actually die so they could try their fortune somewhere the rest of us couldn't keep an eye on them – they suddenly had a lot more trouble getting away with it.

Cause Twilight got the most important tells about vampires right: youthfulness and otherworldly grace. People made it so easy with the cameras everywhere too. I'd actually pull up Twitter on my phone when I'd wake up and search "is a vampire". The humans would do all my work for me.

Then last night I saw this guy, Sora Chitose, apparently so complete an artist, so spellbinding a presence, that he filled the Tokyo Dome by figure skating of all things. The fellow got snapped by a paparazzo after being out of the public eye for the last few years. Three second video before the camera fell out of the photographer's hands. Now the internet was about to black out the sun.

So I hadn't registered him before the video because I ignored Japan. They have kitsune – awful bunch – no sane vampire would bother with that country. But in the video, this Chitose went around like his feet didn't touch the ground. I looked him up and he hadn't aged a day in fifteen years.

I thought, what the hell, they say he lives in Toronto. The cameraman caught him at the reserve just round the corner from me and apparently also sees him at dawn. What's a few hours of my time watching the ducks? So I packed my trusty mirror – you have to use tin-mercury amalgam, nothing else will do it – and a baseball cap and I went out there.

I set myself up on the bench with the clearest view over the main entrance where the photographer got the guy. It was five-thirty am. A single jogger was making the rounds. Bit early, but what was I going to do, get into my coffin already? I'm joking, I'm not telling you where I sleep, that's every vampire's own business. The ducks were ducking and the water was trembling with tiny fish and curious flies. I was scrolling Twitter cause the NFL replays were on.

Anyway it was obvious to me the instant the guy appeared because the fans were not joking – he had an aura. He had to be one of the old ones cause his skin looked like he drank only the fetal blood of lambs and he moved as if gravity was a suggestion. I more or less concluded he was out of my league and I'd send the Watchtower a letter for someone more senior to check in. Well, I say that now, but I'll be honest -- and it sure took me a couple days for me to get out of my tizzy enough to be honest -- in those moments, I hadn't a single thought in my head.

Understand me. A guy that ethereal – there's no way to describe it. I think my psyche couldn't bear it. When I first glimpsed his eyes, my mind fell back on the most beautiful things I'd ever experienced – my childhood's mornings in the alps, those endless miles of untouchable snow. I went under. All that fame and it was clear to me why the paparazzi hadn't caught him for so long. I'd been around a while, built some mental fortitude, and I was enchanted to a standstill. Humans wouldn't stand a chance. A voyeuristic glance would be a grave wrong. Recording without invitation unthinkable.

I sound ridiculous, I know, but the photos miss all that. The photos make him bearable. That day I had no choice but to sit as unobtrusively as possible. I engaged intermittently in a staring competition against my feet or dared to search for a glimpse of his shadow.

Meanwhile he went about unhurriedly. He went to the water. Took off his gloves. Peered under the surface with unforced yet uncanny keenness. His fingers, now hanging by his sides, now soothing the long necks of the reeds, were like feathers, long and light and precise. Peace touched his face, a sort of homecoming, and I kind of felt like I was intruding on some special love he was sharing with that pond, that dormant air, that slumbering pre-dawn.

How long I sat I don't know, but after a while he turned to me – by then the saliva had congealed in my mouth I'm embarrassed to say.

He said, "Would you like an autograph?"

I said, "Please don't mind me, sir."

Above the scarf hiding much of his face, his eyes granted me a beautific smile.

"Everyone should be minded in this world," he said.

Let's say I fell in love and that's why I've been in a haze. No, I'm telling you I could've cried just then.

"I don't have a pen," I said.

He came up to me. Now I couldn't look away; his beauty paralyzed me. He lowered his scarf, revealing a long thin nose and sleek narrow lips. Those features along with his long limbs would have looked disharmonious on anybody else but on him they were perfect. I, who am very beautiful myself, felt inclined to compare myself to a deep-sea fish. I was also about as boneless. As the first grey-green rays of dawn emerged and haloed him, I swore celestial music began to play.

"You look like you've been here a while," he said.

"Just waiting for you," I said like an idiot.

He smiled like he knew.

"I mean you look like you've been on earth for a while."

"Erm."

"Child of the night," he added fondly.

"Ah..." Miraculously I regained part of my tongue. "We don't call ourselves that anymore. Are you also...?"

Though by then I knew he wasn't. I regretted I hadn't studied up on the Other Kinds more over the years. Distantly I figured I should've been scared – generally the more beautiful they are the more powerful and bloodthirsty they can be. But he could have asked for my soul in that moment and I would've given it. Good run, good ending and all. I would've been content.

But he shook his head, a graceful slow swivel left and right. "I'm not one of you. Though it's been some time since I met someone who saw part of my nature. It's a pleasure." Even as he said this, he sounded melancholic. "Will you excuse me for the diversion? I'd like to ask you a question."

"Of course."

"Do you still believe in heaven?"

I was wearing my cross, really a sentimental thing by this point, under my shirt. Somehow it didn't surprise me that he could perceive it.

I said, "I'm not sure. It doesn't matter anymore."

The thing I thought to be true about vampirism, as all of us did and most still do, was that we bought our wakefulness – our centuries and millennia of it – from our afterlives. In exchange for our ever-extended half-humanity, we'd never wake into the next phase. I thought the foxes hated us for that reason. All the cultivation they had to do. But at least they travel for an end.

"But it does matter," said the man.

He pushed his hair back, almost a grooming gesture. When he turned his face I thought I glimpsed a red flame filling his brow. And there came something very still and noble in his mien and in the tilt of his head an avian echo. I shivered. I felt the kind of cold the living feel – not the physical cold, but the goosebumps that herald unequivocal, unstoppable change. Then a fear engulfed me that the wind or the piercing cry of a water-bird would unseat me from my body and sweep me into the vault of the sky, never to return. My fingers dug into the bench.

In a moment my fear passed and I was surprised to find that my heart wasn't racing, never mind that it hadn't beat for a few dozen years.

"You're not ready," the man said serenely. "One day you will be. On that day, remember that I'm one of those who can take you to heaven. You only need to find me. But the path through the clouds is long. One has to believe."

I didn't know how to say that I did now. I believed.

"Don't tell anyone about me," he said, already stepping back with perfectly distanced steps. He winked. "There are foxes."

Then he put his gloves back on and glided back to the path towards the entrance. I emerged from my enchantment it seemed long moments later, when the sky had already turned pale bright. A single white feather lay on my knee – I hadn't seen the man place it. When I picked it up, it shone like gentle sunlight off a brook, and a soft wind in the otherwise still morning seemed to float over my hand, turning the feather in the direction that that splendid creature had gone.

I put it reverently in my pocket. I took off my cross.