Vampie

She glided on pink clouds.
She made heavenly tunes by plucking on the golden strings of the sun rays.
Moonlight shone in her eyes, and rivers' bubbling gurgle flowed through her ears.

She bounced off the moonlit reflections on the water, flew through the sparkly stardust in the darkness of the night, and snuggled face-to-face with her grandmother Moon. Not a night would go by without their hugs and kisses.

Vampie's favourite hideout was in the silent solitude of fragrant blueberry bushes. She discovered this quiet and abandoned place while wandering along a calm meandering river. The weeds and spider webs welcomed her gladly to their world and Vampie simply got lost in it. Blissfully rapt, she spent her time blueberry picking in the densely tangled forest of thin prickly branches. Auch-yum-yum-auch was the rhythm of the berry-picking melody coming from the Vampie's bushes - especially at night.

Shrill screams shot disturbance into the peaceful starry skies when thorns pierced her skin, startling sleepy animals and interrupting uniquely thespian hunting moments of the nocturnal ones.

The painful moments, though, were quite outnumbered by those filled with joyful smacking of her lips as she gorged on the ambrosial purplesweet juice of the blueberries. She packed handfuls of the delicious fruit into her mouth, undermining her lip seal, eliciting gag reflex and putting herself at risk of choking when the purplesweet juice hit her faucial arches and flooded her throat.

But she was an apt eater. The sound waves of smack, smack, mmmm, yum, yum echoed through the night.

Vampie learned best through play and had a bag of her favourite toys stuffed in a hole she had dug under the blueberry bushes. The bag held her paint brush, paint bottle, water color paper pad, and a mortar and pestle.

Vampie drank much of the purplesweet juice from the blueberries she crunched with her pointy little teeth in her mouth. But even more of it, she poured into her paint bottle. One way she turned blueberries into her favourite paint color purple, was by crushing them in the mortar with her pestle.

Another way she made her paint was by a very refined process of chewing the blueberries, separating the blueberry skin fiber from its juice with her tongue, then mixing the juice with her saliva before finally spitting the whole melange of a very special viscosity into her paint bottle.

Because she painted a lot, the crushing and chewing of blueberries into her favourite purple paint went on every night. The resonance of her indefatigable pounding through the night was a nuisance to many, yet somehow Vampie never noticed it. As effervescent energy sweated from her soul, it blended with the blueberry juice to create a magic potion purple paint, and with it many colorful realities.

Bathing in the light of her grandma's kind eye, she painted dreamy natural landscapes over the ones rendered gruesome by mining and burning. One of her preferred paint-over activities centered on the tar sands. When she kissed and hugged with her grandmother Moon high up in the skies, she could see down below the ghostly, scarred swaths of the land that not long ago used to be a home of pristine virgin forests, lakes and rivers.

With a gentle milky light on her face, the grandmother Moon whispered of her fears of the tar sands-disempowered way of life. Hearing grandma's quickened heartbeat in her soft whisper, a volcano of frenzied concern about the irreversible environmental destruction such as the tar sands gushed in Vampie's stomach. As if made of parchment, the edges of the dark, freezing universe caught on fire from her belching screams as she dove down to earth on a hypervelocity blue straggler star.

In less than a light year she found herself next to the blueberry bushes, exhausted and sleepy. After a nap, with cosmic energies revived and strong in her, she splashed the paint over the tar sands. With magical powers in her feet and hands, she worked the purple goo into the sea of rolling hills and valleys, thick with forests, lakes and venous webs of streams, rapids and waterfalls. She created a symphony infused with sounds of nature as a backdrop to her own singing, something she did all night long as she painted until sunrise.

At dawn, amid a silent procession of misty ghosts arising from the river, she bathed to wash away the signs of her nightly adventures. She put on her usual white shirt, a black tie, and a skirt. With a backpack on her shoulders, she flew to school.

It was a mystery to Vampie why the children in her classroom pointed at her face and laughed out loud and also quietly behind her back. Purple circles around her mouth, smeared up to her cheeks, her crimson teeth, the purple stains on the palms of her hands and the glittery stardust matted in her hair were the signature of a secret life she led at night.

Vampie too thought that she would rather be in her coffin than at school. Even though she was an A student, she found the quality of her school experience negative at best. It was based on a backward system of reward and punishment where people with an innovative outlook on life suffered the most. Knowing the feeling of the unconditional embrace of love from her grandmother, Vampie's sense of loss within the school confines was driving her out.

To heal herself from all the injury she sustained at school,she practiced magic. She felt like a blueberry bush and she wanted to be one. Just like the blueberry bush she wanted to be rooted in nature so that she too could enjoy unceasing caresses from the sun and the wind and drink the bursts of love showered in the rain from the skies.

Every time she went to school, she felt her roots being severed. She used her magic to heal the consequences of chopping up of her identity. She wanted to be rooted in who she was just like the blueberry bush – all the time.

One day at school, the cloudy haze of unhappiness over her head suddenly lifted. She saw some military representatives roaming the hallways and the playground full of school children whom they intended to recruit for war.

Military booths in the school hallways attracted poverty-stricken kids with promises of scholarships that would afford them university education.

Vampie, however, was hundred per cent positive that war killed people, scarred their bodies and spirits, and left them without proper compensation and care if they managed to return from the battlefield. She knew that such ruined, abandoned and dead people did not go to school. To her, this was one of the war secrets to spill on her peace placard. Her magic purple paint could never be handier.

She painted "Study War No More!" on a placard, and tied a purple ribbon in a loop on top. The next day, she proudly wore the placard around her neck as part of her school uniform, and faced the military recruiters in the school hallway.

Clad in peace, she stood calm and quiet. Her poise accentuated commotion of all the people who became flustered with her defiant presence. Some teachers and the school principal came out to defend the military recruiters from Vampie, the war resister. The school principal called the security guards who kicked Vampie out on the street after their initial persuasion to give up her peace had failed.

The school thought that they got rid of the troublemaker, but they were wrong.

Vampie took over the street in front of the school. She plastered it with multiples of placards she reproduced and also with banners she additionally painted with her messages of peace. She distributed flyers to all the passersby, alerting them to the ongoing militarization of public education as instantiated by her own school which participated in selling of their students into the war business.

Vampie's message resonated with the city folk who gathered to protest the school's lack of ethics concerning its partnership with war contractors.

Vigils, protests, independent multimedia work, and an official complaint filed with the Securities Commission by the people whose hearts were brimming with tireless devotion to peace, led to an impartial investigation into the military partnership the school was involved in.

It turned out that the parents of the children attending the school were never informed about the visits of the military recruiters, that the whole thing was the principal's affair with his friends in the military, and that he was receiving the kickbacks in return for allowing the military recruiters access to students in his school.

With a sense of personal responsibility in action and some initiative, justice prevailed in the end, giving Vampie a chance to return to her abandon where she continued spinning endless webs of gentle joy.