The Crimson Cleanse

I wanted to write a vampire story that had nothing to do with romance or horror and everything to do with therapy. The idea of an immortal being with an eating disorder felt both absurd and painfully real. Every element of Vlad’s binge cycle maps directly onto patterns that anyone who’s struggled with disordered eating would recognize: the emotional triggers, the isolation, the shame spiral, the using consumption as a substitute for connection. The support group scene with the werewolf and the succubus was my favorite part to write. Turns out the twelve-step format works for any species.

Vladislav Mortenson had been undead for three centuries, plenty of time to develop some very unhealthy habits. Not the blood-drinking. That was biological necessity, the cardiovascular equivalent of breathing for people who no longer breathed. No, his problem was portion control. Where other vampires sipped delicately from willing donors or maintained civilized feeding schedules, Vlad binged like a college freshman at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

He’d been a binger in life, too. Born in 1694 in a village outside Kraków to a family of butchers, he’d grown up in a household where food was currency, affection, and social obligation rolled into one. His mother expressed love through pierogi. His father expressed approval through sausage. By the time Vlad was turned at twenty-three, an unfortunate incident involving a countess, a wine cellar, and a misunderstanding about the nature of the after-party, he’d already spent two decades associating consumption with comfort. Vampirism didn’t create the pattern. It just gave it fangs.

The wake-up call came during his nephew’s wedding when he couldn’t fit into his formal cape. The tailor’s assistant, a nervous young man with an unfortunate stutter, had to let out the seams twice while Vlad stood in the fitting room trying not to catch his reflection in the three-way mirrors. Vampires don’t show up in reflections, but the absence of image in a cape that clearly contained something proved even more mortifying. The fabric strained at angles that defied the known dimensions of formal eveningwear.

“Perhaps the gentleman would prefer a cloak?” the assistant suggested. The vampire equivalent of being offered elastic-waist pants.

Vlad declined the cloak. He wore the cape to the wedding with the seams at maximum capacity and spent the reception standing against a wall, afraid to raise his arms for fear of structural failure. His niece, a practical young woman who worked in insurance and had inherited the family’s gift for uncomfortable honesty, told him he looked like a bat that had swallowed a watermelon. She meant it with love. It didn’t help.

“I need help,” Vlad announced to his therapist the following Tuesday evening.

Dr. Janice Singleton specialized in supernatural self-improvement. She’d built a thriving practice in downtown Portland helping werewolves manage their anger, ghosts work through abandonment issues, and demons address workplace harassment complaints. Her waiting room was designed for supernatural clients: blackout curtains for the photosensitive, reinforced furniture for the lycanthropic, and a white noise machine powerful enough to mask the occasional involuntary howl. She’d never treated a vampire with body image problems, but she took the case with the confidence of a woman who’d once talked a banshee through a panic attack and considered the experience formative.

“Tell me about your relationship with blood,” she said, pen poised over her notepad. The pen was silver, which was a werewolf issue, not a vampire one, but Vlad noticed it anyway. Three centuries of supernatural politics made you hyperaware of metallurgy.

“It’s complicated.” He was sitting in the reinforced chair, which was meant for werewolves but suited him fine. “I know I need it to survive, but I can’t stop once I start. Last week I drained three blood bank donations in one sitting. Three. I was supposed to make those last a month.”

“Walk me through that evening. What happened before the binge?”

“I’d been on a date. A human woman I met through one of those supernatural-friendly apps. She was nice. She knew what I was going in. But halfway through dinner, she was eating, I was pretending to drink wine, she asked how old I was, I said three hundred and seventeen, and she laughed. Then she realized I wasn’t joking, and the conversation died right there. She finished her pasta. I paid the check. She said she’d call.”

“She didn’t call.”

“She didn’t call. I went home. The apartment was dark. I’d forgotten to buy candles again because I keep thinking I’ll remember and I never do, which is ironic for someone with a theoretically infinite lifespan. I sat on the couch for about an hour, feeling sorry for myself, and then I opened the mini-fridge and started drinking.”

Dr. Singleton nodded. “What feelings come up when you feed?”

Vlad shifted in the reinforced chair. “Guilt, mostly. And loneliness. Blood tastes better when you’re sharing it with someone. There’s a social component to feeding that nobody talks about. It’s supposed to be intimate. Connection. Two beings sharing something fundamental. But dating is complicated when you’re technically a corpse with an expiration date that expired in 1717. So I end up feeding alone in my apartment watching television, and then I feel worse, so I feed more, and by the end of the night I’ve gone through a week’s supply and I feel like a bloated tick with self-esteem issues.”

“Classic binge cycle.” She’d seen the same pattern in werewolves who stress-ate raw steaks and in one memorable case a phoenix who compulsively immolated himself during emotional distress. The species changed. The cycle didn’t. “Let’s talk about healthier coping mechanisms.”

The diet proved hard to implement. Vampire nutrition guides were scarce and mostly written by vampires who’d been turned in eras when portion control meant “don’t drain the entire village.” The modern resources were worse: wellness influencers who happened to be undead, posting blood-type compatibility charts and “clean feeding” protocols on social media accounts with handles like @EternalWellness and @SanguineBalance. Vlad tried following one for a week and abandoned the effort after being told his preference for O-negative was “energetically misaligned with his astrological chart.”

He experimented on his own. Smaller, more frequent feedings instead of large midnight binges. Measured portions in medical-grade containers instead of drinking straight from the bag, which Dr. Singleton compared to eating ice cream out of the carton at 2 a.m.: technically functional but psychologically corrosive. He tried meditation to manage the emotional triggers, though sitting in silence for twenty minutes proved difficult when you didn’t have a heartbeat to focus on. The meditation instructor, a Buddhist monk who ran evening sessions for nocturnal clients, suggested he focus on the absence of a heartbeat instead. Vlad found this either profound or depressing depending on the night.

He joined a support group for supernatural beings with impulse control issues. The group met weekly in the basement of a Unitarian church whose congregation had voted unanimously to welcome all sentient beings regardless of vital status. The meetings ran like any twelve-step program: sharing circles, accountability partners, bad coffee. The coffee was for the werewolves and the one human spouse who attended for moral support.

A werewolf named Gary dominated most sessions with lengthy descriptions of his rage blackouts, genuinely terrifying but repetitive after the third week. A succubus named Diane had impulse control issues outside Vlad’s area of concern but generated the most engaged discussion. A ghost named Harold couldn’t eat at all and attended out of what he described as “solidarity and boredom,” though Vlad suspected the real reason was that Harold hadn’t had anyone to talk to since 1987 and would have attended a meeting about anything.

Vlad’s contributions were stilted at first. Admitting to a room full of supernatural beings that you couldn’t control your feeding felt like admitting weakness in a community where weakness got you staked. But the group surprised him. Gary, despite the rage issues, was a good listener. Diane offered practical advice about managing cravings that translated across species. Harold understood the loneliness that drove the binge cycle, because loneliness was the one experience that crossed the boundaries between the living, the dead, and the ambiguously animated.

The breakthrough came six weeks into treatment, during a session where Dr. Singleton asked Vlad to describe his earliest memory of feeding.

“I was newly turned,” he said. “The countess, my maker, she fed me herself. Wrist to mouth. The most intimate thing I’d ever experienced. More than any human contact before or since. For those few minutes, I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t confused about what I’d become. I was just being taken care of.”

“And then?”

“She left. Three nights later. Moved on to another project. I never saw her again.”

The silence in Dr. Singleton’s office lasted a full minute. The white noise machine hummed. The blackout curtains kept the streetlight at bay.

“You’ve been trying to recreate that feeling ever since,” Dr. Singleton said. Not a question.

“Three hundred years of trying to feel that full again. That connected. And every time I fail, I drink more, because more has to be better than less, right? More blood, more quantity, more consumption. If I just drink enough, maybe I’ll stop feeling empty.”

“But it doesn’t work.”

“It never works. I just end up bloated and ashamed and alone in an apartment that smells like a blood bank, watching Criminal Intent reruns at 4 a.m.”

Dr. Singleton put down her pen. “Vlad, your feeding problem isn’t about blood. It’s about connection. You’ve been using consumption as a substitute for intimacy because the first person who showed you intimacy through feeding abandoned you right after. You’ve spent three centuries associating nourishment with loss. Every time you feed, you’re unconsciously expecting the connection to disappear, so you try to consume as much as possible before it does.”

The insight landed like a stake through something that wasn’t his heart but felt close enough to hurt.

Three months later, Vlad buttoned his formal cape for his grand-nephew’s baptism. The seams held. His niece told him he looked distinguished, a significant upgrade from watermelon-bat. He’d dropped two cape sizes and gained something harder to measure: the ability to sit with hunger without panicking, to feel the craving without acting on it, to tell the difference between needing blood and needing company.

He’d started dating again, too. A librarian named Marcus who worked the night shift at the downtown branch and had known about vampires since college. Marcus didn’t mind the blood thing. He kept a well-stocked mini-fridge and understood that some evenings Vlad needed to feed and some evenings he needed to talk and the worst evenings were when he confused the two.

“I never thought I’d say this,” Vlad told Dr. Singleton during their final session, “but being dead doesn’t have to mean feeling lifeless.”

She smiled and made a note in her file. Another successful case. She was already drafting the journal article: “Therapeutic Interventions in Undead Eating Disorders: A Case Study in Vampiric Body Image and Attachment Trauma.”

Outside her window, the sun set over Portland, painting the skyline orange and purple. Below, the city moved through its evening routines: commuters heading home, restaurants opening for dinner, a werewolf in a business suit arguing into his phone about a contract dispute that was “not a full-moon issue, Kevin, it’s a liability issue.” Monsters went to therapy here. The undead learned to stop hating themselves long enough to button a cape and attend a baptism and sit across from a librarian who kept O-negative in the fridge and didn’t ask why.

Vlad called Dr. Singleton at midnight. He’d resisted a binge and wanted someone to know.

“I’m proud of you,” she said.

“I’m proud of me too,” he said, and meant it more.