Who is Claudia Martin?

How was I transformed? I do not remember. I remember before: the house,

my parents, the suitors, and Thoby. And I remember after: hiding, and the
slow realization that the shackles and rules of the old life no longer applied.
And Thoby. But the in-between time I do not remember. And Thoby will not
tell.

You want to know what kind of vampire I am, how I feel about how I feed.
You are fascinated with how I choose my prey, with the remorse I may or
may not feel, so I will tell you. I feel no more nor less remorse than you do.
Certainly I put more thought into my meals than you, and I suspect that
every meal I make (though, sadly, far fewer than you) improves the quality
of the earth, for you merely denude the earth of resources sought or created
for your own use, whereas I relieve the earth of a consumer, and survive on
a resource that renews and regenerates all on its own without any husbandry
from me.

But I should not lecture; it took me a hundred years to come to this

realization, with agony and soul-searching (supposing I still have one), and
too many moments of seeing the mirror that Thoby always insists on holding
before me. And before that, I had to stop using instinct and self-interest and
blank opportunity to satisfy my desires. And before that I had to be released
from a way of life that prevented me from considering – indeed, which
censored anyone who moved beyond our choreographed round of rise,
dress, call, dress, dine, tea, ball.

I had a few shocks along the way.

So no, I am not the chupacabra-like creature feeding on animals and

yearning for goodness that you might have encountered elsewhere.
I am not tormented by self-loathing into starvation, as one interviewee
recounted, nor am I so drunk on my powers that I flaunt them to all whose
attention I can claim.

Nor am I a mindless killing machine with no bounds or moral consideration,

as the oldest stories of my kind portray.

No, I am none of these. I am just a young girl of moderate intelligence

liberated from the society into which I was born, and existing in a continuum
far longer than a humans’s, with my senses heightened and my sensibilities
enlightened by my companion and former neighbor, the astounding Thoby
Stephen. Like all of you, sometimes I do good, sometimes evil. I make
mistakes. I exist in a society with its own rules and I don’t always know what
to do with my own dissent. I am just like you. Except that I drink human
blood to survive. And for that, I do not apologize.