Resurrecting “Hall of Broken Mirrors”: My Vampire Story That Refuses to Die

About thirteen years ago I was a newlywed early in the morning of my first anniversary. I left my then-husband in bed around 5 in the morning because I’d woken from an exciting dream in which I was a vampire scaling a building with a cow in my jaws. I was being pursued by werewolves in the streets beneath me. I remember how vivid the sensation of blood syphoning up snake-like fangs and gushing down my throat, how strangely welcome the taste and temperature.

I’d yet to read the Twilight novels, but I’d swallowed up The Vampire Diaries and Anita Blake series through junior high, and “vampire” had become my go-to in-dream super-ego, next to a version of myself with functioning wings.

I spent the entire day of my first anniversary working on a first draft of a novel that would linger and simmer in my subconscious for over a decade. I finished that first draft and then let it sit while life continued to happen and I grew increasingly dissatisfied with much of it, as the person who initially wrote it changed fundamentally. For example, I had lesbian, bisexual, and nonbinary undertones that some in my writer’s group had picked up on before I was even ready to acknowledge the same in myself. Now, as I float between multiple unfinished projects, looking for something on my backlist to fix on since finishing The Music of Pedro, I’ve been rereading old notes and chapters and I wanted to share a few chapter bumpers.

They compel me to think more deeply about what has captivated me about vampirism and what it implies (to me): invulnerability, complex solitude, the association with “otherness,” immortality, perfectly intact memory, beauty and the unending quest for satiation. Why does (or doesn’t) vampire mythology interest you?

Chapter Bumpers (Glimpses of the Protag’s Past)

Bumper 1:

Bumper 2:

It was in the pasture that I saw them, Ramon and Mercedes. Drippy-eyed Ramon with the slow hands and watery looks. He was too old for her, too often in town splashing poison on his tongue and hanging on the shoulders of the cherry-mouthed women that Mama said were diseased and Papi said were ugly behind their red lips.

I told Papi. He rode out on Café. Took the whip. And drove Ramon out of El Paso del Norte that day. The next week a new vaquero had his bunk at the ranchero.

Mercedes wept. It was a month before she would speak to me, a year before she was dead.

I should not have told Papi.

Bumper 3:

The woman comes with others, but I know only her. She is my grandmother—an angel of golden hair and milk skin—come back from the dead in the form of her youth to defend the granddaughters she’d never claimed in life.

But she comes too late to save her favorite son. The Tejanos already hanged him from the gate and shot my mother. She rips their killers to the bone before they can do the same to her granddaughters, satisfying the fury in my breast while answering a childhood’s worth of prayers: our grandmother loved us at last.

I have never met her, but I’d glimpsed her likeness in the gold pocket watch Papi rarely let me touch—the watch he broke under a boot the day he learned that she was dead. He could not forgive, but I’d forgiven her all, for cutting him off in her dying breath, for hating my mother, for letting me grow and never caring to watch, because someone so beautiful had to be divine.

Bumper 4:

In the desert, I cower alone in the shadows of the saguaros, blanketed in my skirts. The sun has changed. Its light boils my skin. And the pain is like the demon’s bite, when the fire went deep and seared like a brand.

As the hours pass, I follow the shadows until night falls and the cool dark balms my steaming skin. And then I sate my thirst with all that moves, guilty in the slow, moaning pleasure of the feed. And the more life I take, the clearer I think, and I remember my fingers hooked inside the demon’s throat.

The others were torn already; I tore until they wouldn’t move, and my dress hung heavy with their blood, but she was the last. Her eyes were wide and blue like flame, her skin white as bone.

Throat slippery, ready to crumble like tinder, snake-fangs weeping down her chin, she was ugly. And she was not my grandmother. And she was not an angel. 

I wander the desert and wonder why I didn’t break her, too.

Bumper 5:

Another night descends upon the dove-white slopes of Telluride, Colorado. The sky blinks and the world floats in blindness beneath it. This night will pass like all the rest.

A life or two dissolve between my teeth and I lay back on a crisp sheet of snow to watch the skies. Like a fine mist, the darkness dews upon my skin. I breathe it into my lungs, feel it drip into my ears and penetrate my mind, where it freezes like a habit I will never break.

In the darkness, my carcass steeps for hours, submerged and still and bloated.