Concentrated within our school lives many vampires, my friend says. I don’t know much about vampires but I assume Andy does. He points them out with conviction, with a certainty that seems to indicate a deep reservoir of knowledge that I am in no position to doubt. Listening to Andy, I learn that many vampires live among this hard landscape of Northern Ontario where dark rock juts from the ground and wraps the earth like giant fallen cathedrals of jagged edges. And then I wonder how I ended up here among them and I wonder if other places have vampires or werewolves or bigfoots or those other strange things we invent to express our feelings of difference.

School recess ticks away.

            I say, “Maybe they are only pretending to be vampires.”

            Andy says, sternly, “You can’t be too careful.”

            Andy says, “They suck your blood.”

            The ground rumbles as explosives from the local mine ignite thousands of feet below and create large cavernous structures of precious metal and darkness. The pillars that support our friendship shake and the ground briefly opens revealing the hollow centre of our lives lived in this region of the world where nothing is supposed to happen. People are supposed to live simple lives out here and yet somehow this is the place where strange creatures have homed themselves. Precious ore is extracted from the flesh of earth and the rumble subsides.

            Andy says, “Don’t play along.”

Andy says, “Vampires go to hell.”

            Andy says a lot of things but I don’t want to risk visiting the underworld. I don’t want to risk arriving at the gates with Andy going one way and me the other. The minister at our church had said that belief in Jesus Christ was necessary for entry to heaven so I told myself that I believed in Jesus. I said it strongly one night before bed with my hands balled together in a little pocket of energy. I said it over and over and over again. I said, “I believe in Jesus” out loud in the deep stillness of my bedroom, in the dark pit of my vision produced from my balled eyes shut tightly, as if God could detect how much energy I was putting into communicating with him. I said, “I believe in Jesus” again and again and then mined my brain for that little cavity in thought where truth and conviction reside. I prayed to live the simple life that Northern Ontario was supposed to promise me, one where strange things like vampires didn’t exist. I slipped into bed and wondered if Andy had done the same thing. Artillery detonated somewhere in the yawning chasm beneath and the rumble rocked me to sleep.

            At the sight of my doubting face, Andy says he’ll prove vampires exist which is a promise to make the simple life I want to live more complicated and I wince at the thought. He says he’ll prove they are among us and that they attend our school. The only thing they’re pretending to be is our friends. Salt contacting their skin will reveal their true nature, he says, the same salt used to melt ice in winter. The veneer of their play will dissolve and their undead ways will be laid bare and the mystery that seems to blanket this act of living will evaporate.

            Behind a plastic bin of salt near the basketball court I huddle at Andy’s direction and wait for the vampires to appear. I wish for a wisdom to discern all the things people pretend to be. I watch other kids in acts of play unaware of the threat that lurks on the periphery of exposure. Andy jumps forward and interrupts their fun. He yells for me to lift the lid on the plastic bin of salt, ready to launch little rocks of brackish crystals at their friendship. I grasp the bin and pull against a latched lid. I heave and pull and heave some more, but it remains shut. Andy stands frozen and says nothing, the first time I’ve seen such a deep quiet consume him.

The apparent vampires watch us both, wondering whether their eyes deceive them. They don’t give the moment much more thought than that and their play resumes from where it had paused. They move past us, past the bin of salt, past Andy. A pillar without a building to support, a church without a congregation. I see the exposed bedrock of his hubris. The ground shakes from some subterranean shaft eating explosives. Birds unfurl from trees and fold into the sky.

Andy looks to me, seemingly convinced that I am somehow to blame for the locked bin. I stare back and meet his gaze, hoping his failure has convinced him that this is a moment for play, to live a simple life while we still have the chance and free from the worry that we need to understand the strange things that are among us. He clears his throat after a long pause and says, “We’ll get them next time.”

He walks away, leaving me to try and keep my balance on the shaking ground beneath our feet.

 Mitchell Gauvin is a Canadian-born, Germany-based writer, editor, and academic. His fiction has appeared in several publications, including Broken Pencil magazine, NEST by Gutterbird, Feathertale Review, and SAND. His debut novel Vandal Confession was published in 2015 and translated into French for Éditions XYZ in 2017. He also served as the editor for the short fiction anthology Along the 46th (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2015).