text: Your neighbor is a vampire. It’s the only thing that makes any sense. First, he dresses EXACTLY like Dracula, all the time, even when alone in the house. Second, you never see him in the day, only at night. And third, even though he has a kitchen, you’ve never seen him eat, and even though he has a bathroom, you never see him use it. You learned all these things over the past few weeks, shortly after getting a telescope for your birthday. You’ve been watching him, every so often, through his windows. It’s how you discovered his peculiarities. It kind of scares you, really, but you keep watching, night after night. Sometimes he’s on the couch in the living room, reading a book. Sometimes he’s playing the piano he has in the upstairs hall. Sometimes he puts on a record and dances like no one’s watching, even though someone is watching. But anything to do with normal human functions? Eating, drinking, going to the bathroom? Nowhere to be found. Weeks go by. You reach the limit of what can be learned by peaking through windows. So you break into his house one Saturday morning, throwing a rock through a window and loosening the bolt. You look into his fridge, and there’s no food, but there are stacks and stacks of bags filled with a dark red liquid. It’s blood. You look around some more. You realize there’s no mirrors anywhere. Finally you get to a closed door upstairs. You push it open and see, pushed up against the wall and resting on a large block, a coffin. You creep over to it and gently open the lid. Inside is your neighbor, with a trickle of blood running down his mouth. Up close you can see his two sharp fangs protruding over his lip. It’s confirmed. Definitely a vampire. Only one thing to do. You go back downstairs and smash one of the chairs in the kitchen, made from a heavy pine wood. You’d think the noise would wake someone, but the vampire remained fast asleep. You take one of the legs and, with a knife from the counter, sharpen it to a point. Finally, you grab a meat tenderizer from one of the drawers and go back upstairs, on to the coffin room. You lift the lid, place the stake, and pound down the hammer. Your neighbor wakes up, screams, then crumbles to dust right there. You did it. You killed the vampire. And it wasn’t even that hard. You go home, feeling very proud of yourself. Until later that night, when the police show up at your house. They say they have a warrant for your arrest, for breaking into your neighbor’s house and killing him. But, you say, he was a vampire. And the police say yes he was, but that doesn’t mean you can just kill him like that. You’re impressed by how casually they agreed he was a vampire, but distressed by them believing what you did was murder. Later, at your trial, you learn that, yes, your neighbor was indeed a vampire. A vampire who sponsored the town’s youth sports league. A vampire who taught adult literacy classes at the local community college. A vampire who let people use his lawn in the summer for free movie nights. A vampire, in other words, who cared. And then, the prosecutor says pointing at you, this villain over here broke into his house, destroyed his furniture, and killed him without mercy. And doesn’t even feel sorry about it! What crime, the prosecutor asks, did this vampire commit? Was he bothering anyone? Hurting anyone? Doing anything to deserve a stake through the heart? He. Did. Not. Your own lawyer argues that all vampires must drink blood to survive and so he had to have been a monster. But then you learn that he actually bought his blood from a blood bank like any respectable vampire would. And then your lawyer actually says “well I got nothing then” and sits down and that’s the end of that. The jury doesn’t take long at all. In just a few minutes they come back and say they find you guilty. You spend the rest of your life feeling like you should have thought things through a little more.