Our Infinite Sadness

Terrence

Sunday, February 20, 2022
Juneau, Alaska

On winter break, Edythe Cullen ran from Washington State to Alaska.

She reveled in movement, the use of her muscles, and running most especially. She danced acrobatically across the uppermost treetops of conifer woodlands with all four limbs, free as a gossamer winged angel, exultant in the bright sunlight that composed refractory madrigals upon her diamond skin.

Movement, the antithesis of stasis, inspired Edythe to overcome her nature and feel almost alive.

While she intensely enjoyed physical exercise, she seldom ran fifteen hundred miles on a lark, and this recreational excursion did have a practical justification: her adoptive parents, Carlisle and Esme, wanted her to give Terrence another try.

Terrence and his family of five vampires maintained a permanent residence on the southern fringes of Denali, in Juneau's northern outskirts. The two families practiced a similar ethos in accordance with Carlisle's philosophy of gentle compassion for their antecedents and a life of temperance. In practice these few adherents abstained with monastic forbearance from their primary food source, human prey, and only hunted animals. They were the only two such enclaves in the world, to Carlisle's knowledge, and they had been friends for close to a century.

The hunting in Alaska was fabulous if animals were one's diet: a mouthwatering abundance of polar bears, wolves, seals, orca, walruses. The hunting was not so good for carnivores— Edythe's pejorative for those of her kind who fed on warm human blood with no compunction. The sparse human population in Alaska's upper wilderness made for slim pickings, and thirsty immortals rarely bothered to stray so far north. The consequently thin vampiric presence also made Alaska suitable for solitude and reflection.

Carlisle's family had recently lived up in Juneau, over a four year span, solely to afford Terrence and Edythe the opportunity to kindle a fire. No sparks flew. Or more precisely, the enchantment kindled in only one direction. Both families yearned for the stillborn match and implored Edythe to keep trying, so she did, for their sakes.

To Edythe's mind, Terrence did constitute unfinished business and a rationale for the errand, but for the most part she ran that far to break the tedium.

Having to endure high school for the twenty-first time was, to Edythe, a cyclical insult taken ad absurdum. Why did she endure it and not simply bury herself and freeze? Because even a centuries-long dormancy would not have entirely suspended consciousness. As vacuous as she found the unremitting penance of her daily humanesque charade, at least high school broke up the day. Now even that diversion was denied her, as the human children were off for the week on winter break, five days away from that austere cinderblock sanitarium, so she escaped her present locale, the fine hamlet of Forks, Washington, for sake of her sanity.

On Edythe's second birth into this non-life, God had seen fit to burnish her torment by making it impossible not to see and hear through the heads of everyone in her vicinity— both vampires, such as herself, and her considerably more plentiful human prey. She was a telepath, in a word, possessed of an extrasensory talent that came as naturally as vision or olfaction.

Like any other sense, this blessing and curse came without an off-switch. She had to flee north of the Arctic Circle just for silence.

Her two adoptive parents and four siblings were all home, constantly in her head. All six were paired off amorously, and she had no escape from their blatant and unremitting displays of affection. In the defense of her cohabiters, vampires had a penchant for distracting themselves easily by sensory and emotive stimuli, and given the intensity of their drives and senses, they tended to be distracted quite often by their attraction to each other. All seven family members were mature adults—school was simply a necessary pretense of the human charade—and they comprised an eclectic, libertarian household.