Reporter’s Notebook: Children of the Night

As part of this week’s feature, “True True Blood,” about real vampires in Kansas City, we asked our vamps to write their own sections expressing what it’s like to be a Nosferatu while pop culture fetishizes the myth. Unfortunately, we had to cut some of their responses down for space. In the case of Lisa, the blood-drinker pictured here, we had to cut a paragraph that summed up why she drank “the red stuff,” as she called it.

From Lisa’s e-mail:

“It’s been a long time since my last drink. Sure, I get by on

background energy. But sometimes it makes me feel like an amoeba, or a

sponge. It’s not that it feels unnatural — nature is full of parasites,

and at least I’m nice abut it — it’s just so impersonal. I still feel

that calm, tingly, alertness; the inevitable satisfaction of a predator

who knows she hasn’t been detected. Yet I find myself thinking about

all the people I’ve fed on in the past to fill that gap, that crucial

piece that sets me apart from identifying with the psys. Just because I

can live on spam and macaroni doesn’t mean I want to.”

If that’s what we cut, just imagine what made it into print.