The oldest vampires do not drink blood. This is not virtue — they are long past virtue, past the need for the opinions of lesser creatures regarding their choices. It is aesthetics. After four centuries, the blood tastes like everything else: like the metal of a coin, like old wood, like an exhausted argument. What Maris takes is memory. A light touch, a moment of contact, and there it is — the particular vivid brightness of a human life, which is so short and so unconscious of its own shortness and burns, for that reason, like nothing else in the world.
She takes only what they won't miss. Old shames, which calcify and impede; regrets that have curdled past usefulness; the particular grief of losses so old the person has forgotten they are grieving. She does them a service. She tells herself this. She has told herself this long enough that it has become a kind of truth, which is the only kind of truth she traffics in now. The young woman on the train platform this evening was carrying a memory of her father's voice that she had been holding so long she no longer knew why it hurt. Maris took it so gently the girl only shivered and looked up at the passing city as though trying to remember something.
The collection takes up four rooms in her house. Not the memories themselves — those live in her, organised and cross-referenced in the architectural way of old minds — but the objects she has gathered as indexing: a button, a pressed flower, a child's drawing on a napkin. Anchors. Four centuries of other people's lives, kept in the dark rooms of a house where no one comes to visit. Maris walks through the collection some evenings and wonders if this is what curators feel — this particular combination of ownership and obligation, this sense of being the last one who knows.
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