By Alice Hatcher

Dracula sullenly regards his study’s sagging shelves, little comforted by the arcane knowledge preserved in his vast collection of disintegrating leather-bound books. In his gnarled hands, he holds the well-thumbed copy of Twilight that he discovered on his windowsill—a book Renfield presumably misplaced during one of his lunatic fits. Dracula trails his bony fingers over the title page and shudders, considering the book’s exaltations of adolescent abstinence; the book, which he has wasted the night reading, says nothing of sunken incisors and sanguinary bliss.

This evening, Dracula is especially agitated, despairing in his efforts to capitalize on the vampire craze and tortured by the cretin intellect of his incompetent agent. Yesterday, he received one of her senseless missives and almost choked on its message: “Editors deam your memoir too morbid for mainstream readers (no market niche).” Her egregious misspelling of “deem” alone merits her dismissal, but he lacks the energy or will to don his cape, summon his stagecoach, and make the logistically nightmarish journey—for a vampire requiring conveyance in a coffin—to London. Demoralization has bred inaction. He feels paralyzed by the gross misrepresentations and pale imitations of infamy contained in every “vampire sex novel” and piece of parasitical fanfiction sullying the bestseller lists. Never, in all of Eternity, has he attended a “frat party” with Frankenstein’s monster.

He casts aside Renfield’s copy of Twilight and paces. He is Lord of the Undead Aristocracy, but his nocturnal reign is drawing to a close. He once instilled terror and awe. Now, thanks to the accursed scribbling of Stephenie Meyer and her literary ilk, young men and women invariably decline his advances. To them, he is an innocuous old man with a funny mustache, parchment skin, and bushy eyebrows—an ancient grotesquerie routinely passed over for epilated vegetarians.

No one is immune from this madness. Bats swoop from the trees to shit on his head. Wolves urinate on his wrought-iron gates. The Hounds of Hell hump his legs in obscene alpha displays. Even Renfield dismisses his infernal powers. Dracula listens to his errant minion in the next room, watching reruns of The Vampire Diaries. Renfield is an insolent fool, impudent in his latest round of refusals, and insensate to the thrill of corruption. Renfield will not eat his rats. No longer titillated by their squeals and shrieks, he disavows blood as an essential elixir for the damned.

In this treachery, Renfield is not alone. Dracula’s hellish handmaidens sneer at the wisdom of his years. Apostates, they lounge on the ramparts beneath his window, swiping the screens of glowing phones and swapping gossip about saccharine starlets and fatuous actors barely old enough to tie their own capes. Enthralled by youth, they care nothing for wizened flesh or the slow pleasures of immortality. He considers thrashing Renfield and baring his incisors at his undead exes, but dawn’s imminence drives him from his study and toward the spiral staircase leading to his castle’s subterranean chambers.

He pauses at the door to Renfield’s room and recoils from the sight of Renfield sitting on the floor, feeding lettuce leaves to an obese calico rabbit.

“Give it to me,” Dracula commands over the sounds of Renfield’s television.

“Leave him be,” Renfield hisses, stroking the rabbit’s floppy ears. “I found him in my garden.” Renfield’s bloodshot eyes shine with glee. “He was being so very naughty, Master, and so cute, nibbling on my carrot tops and cabbages.”

At the mention of vegetables, Dracula gnashes his teeth. “This little garden of yours. How long has this nonsense been going on?”

“One glorious year.” Renfield coos into the rabbit’s ear. “We will feast, Peter, on the tender shoots of fresh greens.”

“The doctors in that so-called sanitorium are useless. Someone should siphon your psychiatrist,” Dracula mutters. “This Cymbalta. Shouldn’t it be taking effect by now? Restoring you to…your old self?”

“It’s a miracle drug, Master. I’ve never felt more alive,” Renfield says. “Would you like to pet Peter? He’s so very soft.”

Dracula considers the rabbit’s twitching nose and feels a slight contraction in his long-dormant heart. The rabbit, he admits, is adorable. Realizing the extent of his weakness, he panics and races down worn stairs, spiraling past cobwebs and flickering torches and raging at Renfield’s “new normal.”

In his coffin chamber, he flares his nostrils to imbibe the scent of dank earth and tries to compose himself. I can’t allow anger to rule my mind, he thinks; life is too short, and I’ll have a heart attack if I don’t manage my stress. Then he smacks his forehead and curses the irrelevant platitudes and health obsessions lodged in his brain after years of exposure to the caustic light of Renfield’s television. At the sight of the dusty meditation bench at the foot of his coffin, he howls at the walls and claws at the bat excrement crusted on his cape.

I have lapsed in my mindfulness practice, he concedes, and frittered away years pondering unsolvable problems and hopeless cases.

Chastened, he lowers himself onto the bench and settles into a meditative pose. As centuries of tension drain from his shoulders, he focuses on his breath—the stillness—between his snarling lips. If the mind wanders, he repeats, gently bring it back to the…breath, with an attitude of non-judgement.

In the absolute darkness of his chamber, he is immune to dawn breaking and the glow of gadgets, and attuned to every sensation arising, moment by moment, breath by non-existent breath. His mind quiets as he accepts himself for what he is: Evil Incarnate, indisputably immortal, and, yes, riddled with insecurities and prone to mania from dealing with the provocations of rat-less Renfield.

Self-acceptance, however, is short-lived. He can’t escape the familiar craving for external validation and the adulation of his iron-deficient servant. Eventually, the bloodless tide will turn. Patience is a virtue, he assures himself, exalting in renewed fantasies of depravity, and then he cringes at the sanctimonious voice, the platitude, in his head.