Therefore! I am not Mercy. Yeah?

I’ve been waiting for you to pivot to that, but you haven’t. You haven’t once wavered away from Mercy as Mercy in the text … until that little “Mary? No, Mercy” bit from your mom. Oh, man, when I read that I sat up in my coffin—come on, that was funny—but then you totally breezed by it, and a little too casually for the casual reveal. I kept waiting for you to point your authory, Nosferaturian fingers at it. But you didn’t. Now, I think you included it in the novel subconsciously, and, man, for all the internalized spelunking you do, you need to listen to yourself closer.

Wouldn’t it make more story sense that I am Mercy’s sister, Mary? Mary was exhumed on the same gloomy day as her sister, but no one removed Mary’s heart, or whatever was left of it. Mercy was cured. Mary wasn’t. Think about it. Older brother Edwin still died after the exhumations and Mercy’s heart roast. Also, how did Mercy catch the wasting disease in the first place? Go back and reread the history paper you and I wrote. In my interview I, as Mercy, described my sister, MARY, sitting on my chest and going through the whole spectral vamp bit. You, Art, assumed and present it as Mercy’s origin story, of how Mercy became a vampire. And THEN, prior to the sleepover, I go on to ramble about not knowing how I was made into a vampire. Maybe … it’s because I wasn’t Mercy, and I was MARY the whole time!

Everyone loves a good plot twist. The best twists may leave us dizzy while we recalibrate, but they are ultimately reassuring. The twist reinforces the rules of storytelling, and we take comfort because we misapply those rules, believing there are those plot/story gears in our own lives, gears that are tightened and greased and lovingly tended to. If only, right?

The Mary/Mercy twist as described above works. Mary still has her heart, and she fills it with your metaphorical blood, baby!

Not for nothing, it’s possible I’m not Mercy or Mary and I’m Kathleen Blanchet, the not-quite-dead person you served at the first Pallbearers Club meeting, and I latched on to you without context, without reason beyond convenience—mine, not yours—and chance, and as I drained your heart, I filled your head with Mercy Brown. Real life works *that* way, but not stories, not novels. Not the ones we want to read anyway. Novels are lies. Great, big, wonderful lies.

I’ve said this multiple times before, but I am dreading the upcoming pages, the final pages, even though, at this point in the editing/critiquing, I know how it ends for all but the shouting. You have some shouting left to do.

I want to get the following in writing though: