I look at my arms. Their lines. The bones that I was born with. The shape of my wrists. Hands that over the next few centuries will probably keep painting but, maybe, also do other things. What will they touch? Humans; perhaps other vampires; perhaps other beings entirely, things I don’t know about yet: if it’s possible, my own children, maybe; mountaintops and thin mountain air; sand and sea; dark, vacuous space; the surfaces of other planets; the regolith scattered in the craters on them; meteor dust; the fire of the Sun. Will there be someone else with me, I wonder, when I do all of those things; will there be another hand in my hand, perhaps. My mother’s? A daughter’s? A son’s? Will I have company I’ll have created for myself, either as a mother or as a sire, or as both? Should I live alone for a bit first? Or should I make someone now?

I crawl to the table that has all my stuff on it, and I pull myself up. I sit in the chair closest to me, and then I squeeze some colors from the tubes of paint onto the plate I’ve been using as a palette. I do all of this without really thinking. I pull Yaga off the washing line. I hold her against my body, without putting my hand into her. I keep her as she is, dark and empty inside, strange and unanimated as I’d found her—and then I start painting over the human Yaga I created last night. I use all the same colors but change Yaga into something that feels more accurate—accurate to how the puppet Yaga looks but also to how I’m feeling. I keep some of the human skin and human hair, but I pull the dark background into the body so that it’s not clear where the edge of the figure and the edge of the night behind are. A moon shines down from deep in Yaga’s hair and reflects in her eyes.

I don’t finish the painting, but I make a good start. Soon, though, I can’t continue. My hunger is so intense, and I feel so heavy and so dizzy and so empty, that I have to hold my arms out to stay balanced on the chair. And then I just fall off, with a thud, my head throbbing.