M. D. Smith
The Education of Vampire Bobby Lassater
Bobby Lassater was ten years old when he died, which is an awkward age to be a vampire undead. Old enough to recognize irony, too young to be taken seriously by immortals who had seen empires rise, fall, and be replaced by chain restaurants.
He lived in the depths of an abandoned coal mine in West Virginia, sharing subterranean real estate among fourteen vampires who referred to themselves—without irony—as the Family. Their coffins were arranged like pews in a church no one attended anymore, each filled with soil hauled lovingly from ancestral homelands: Transylvanian soil, Balkan clay, Carpathian loam, and a suspicious amount of dirt labeled simply “Old Country, Don’t Ask.” Of course, everyone asked about it, and no one answered.
Bobby’s coffin was different. His dirt came from the mine floor itself—coal dust, broken shale, and the damp mineral smell of Appalachian neglect. He had not traveled across oceans to become a vampire. He had wandered into history by accident, flashlight failing, curiosity intact, and met a woman with too many teeth and not enough mercy.
She drained him almost dry. Which is how you get a child vampire: not with ceremony or consent, but with poor portion control.
The Family did not let Bobby hunt humans. This was framed as a matter of ethics, though everyone knew it was really about liability. A ten-year-old vampire with impulse control issues and a lisp was a public relations disaster waiting to happen.
“Try animals,” said Viktor, who had last legally existed under the Ottoman Empire. “It’s for your own good,” he said, smoothing his mustache like a man about to lie. “Build skill. Learn restraint.”
“Yes,” Ilse added dryly, “and every year humans become more litigious.”
Bobby tried a sleeping doe.
The deer woke up screeching—an undignified sound that carried like gossip through the woods. Her mate, a buck with antlers shaped like agricultural equipment, arrived immediately and gored Bobby in what scholars might later describe as an argument. Shirt shredded. He was launched bodily into a tree, where he hung, impaled by embarrassment, until the buck lost interest.
Bobby could not die. But he could lose dignity, which he did in bulk.
He returned limping to the mine just before dawn, clothes torn, leaves and twigs lodged in his long hair, antler-shaped bruises blooming artistically across his torso, and pride flayed. The Family laughed. Centuries of restraint collapsed into wheezing, coffin-slapping mirth.
“Bambi fights back now,” someone said.
“Nature,” said Marta, sipping from a crystal goblet, “has opinions.”
“He should see himself in a mirror,” an elder joked. “But he can’t.”
After that, Bobby experimented, and things went downhill.
A raccoon bit him. Twice.
A goat head-butted him so hard his vision briefly included stars not visible from Earth.
A porcupine resulted in a face full of quills and a moral lesson about assumptions. A wolf left him with puncture wounds deep enough to whistle in the wind because Bobby stepped on a dry twig at the critical moment—a failure of narrative tension and basic awareness.
“You must approach with calm,” Viktor instructed.
“I was calm,” Bobby protested.
“You hissed.”
“I whisper-hissed.”
Sometimes the older vampires brought him blood in zip-lock bags, like lunch leftovers. O-negative, A-positive, one unlabeled bag everyone pretended not to ask about.
Bobby hated the bags. Cold blood had the emotional warmth of a voicemail apology.
He wanted to hunt. He wanted to matter.
One night, bleeding from multiple species and time zones, Bobby managed to turn into a vampire bat—an achievement he announced loudly while still airborne—and flapped back toward the mine. He misjudged the entrance, ricocheted off a rock face, and reverted mid-fall, landing in a heap of limbs and fur, unconscious.
He arrived at sunrise, still intact.
The Family stared.
“You should be ash,” said Ilse. “Vampires can’t tolerate the sun. You’re more of an oddity than we thought.”
Bobby blinked. “I forgot.”
They began whispering the word banishment, a dramatic term for exile, but sounds worse when you’re ten, homeless, and immortality is on the line. There sure as hell wouldn’t be anywhere else he could find friendship, much less companionship.
“Please let me stay on. I know I’m different, but I don’t have any other place to go.”
“The council of elders will discuss it, Bobby, but I can’t be very optimistic,” said Dracula’s brother, one of the oldest there.
Then the mountain shook.
A bulldozer chewed into the earth above the mine, followed by men in hard hats discussing views and retreats and natural light, which is vampire for existential threat. The Family surged toward the entrance in panic—until sunlight sliced down the shaft like a blade and drove them back, hissing and blistering.
Bobby stood at the edge, coal dust steaming faintly from his skin.
“Don’t,” Viktor said. “You’ll burn.”
Bobby didn’t.
He walked into the light, squinting, clothes still torn, face still dotted with quill scars. The construction crew saw a pale, blood-smeared child in black, emerge from the mountain like a coal-born ghost with unresolved issues and long, protruding canine teeth.
They screamed.
Bobby screamed louder. He did not know why. It just felt right.
The bulldozer driver froze long enough for Bobby to grab his arm and—finally—drink. Just a taste. Enough to feel warmth that wasn’t borrowed or plastic-sealed.
The driver fled. The crew fled. The bulldozer idled, abandoned like a mechanical monument to bad decisions.
Bobby stood alone in the sun, alive, undead, victorious.
The Family watched from the shadows in stunned silence.
That night, no one laughed.
Viktor placed a hand on Bobby’s shoulder. “You saved us.”
Bobby nodded, wiping coal dust from his face. “Am I still a loser and getting banished?”
Viktor smiled, revealing centuries of teeth. “Banishment? No. Loser? Yes. But you’re our loser.”
Which, in the long tragicomic tradition of vampire immortality, was as close to love as it would ever get.
M.D. Smith of Huntsville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Spillwords, Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Phantoms, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. https://mdsmithiv.com/
