Description
When I was nine years old, I went on a school camp to a rural town called Mardan, in South Gippsland, Victoria, Australia. It was rainy and damp, with heavy, slate-grey clouds against the lush, rolling hills. We walked to the church in the misty, drizzling atmosphere. One of the girls, with thin red lips and an inexplicable charm took great delight in whispering to me that she was a vampire. I suggested we might celebrate this curious and dark confession of hers. How, she asked. Well, with a celebratory dance, I proposed. Here? Yeah, on these graves. Since you're undead, you might as well celebrate with those that actually are. That makes sense to me, she agreed. So we danced on the grave stones in the rain to mark the occasion, blissful, carefree and irreverent, intoxicated with the notion of a vampiric identity...
