Starving for Salvation
“Yes, child,” Matty said, forcing himself to open his eyes again, “I am a vampire.”
“Are you a real vampire?”
Matty’s temples pounded along with every other part of him where blood should have flowed but no longer did. He grasped his bedsheet with both hands in the futile hope that the texture of the fabric would somehow lessen the relentless gnawing under every inch of his anorexic flesh.
It was one thing to be undead but another to be on his 103rd day of repentant starvation at St. Camillus de Lellis Hospice Center. He pressed his dry lips together and closed his eyes tighter. His throat burned, having received no liquid since Eucharist the night before. Constant hunger made his fangs scream for relief that would never come again. To be awakened by a voice clearly belonging to a child meant this had to be the middle of the day, a dreadful time for an already suffering vampire to be conscious.
“I said, ‘Are you a real vampire?’”
Holding back a groan, Matty struggled to open one eye. A little girl with a comically large side ponytail stood at the foot of his bed. Opening his other eye, he noted that the girl wore an oversized T-shirt with the starfish logo of an aquarium and a shark tooth necklace.
In one hand, she clutched the gooey stick of a dripping orange cream bar. Her eyes remained focused on Matty as she licked her frozen treat. She was clearly one of those children who licked rather than bit into desserts to make them last longer, only to lose a great deal of the juice as it melted.
Matty swallowed, wishing that the droplets of juice from the girl’s melting cream bar would miraculously fly into his throat. That was a stupid pseudo-prayer. Only human blood could quench his thirst, and even before his act of perfect contrition, he never fed on children. Nothing would pass through his parched lips until he received Eucharist again tonight.
He closed his eyes, silently praying a Hail Mary that he would not seek the Blood of Christ to merely satisfy his appetite.
“I said-”
“Yes, child,” Matty said, forcing himself to open his eyes again, “I am a vampire.”
The girl nibbled on the edge of her cream bar, probably realizing she would lose it to melting otherwise. “My name isn’t ‘child.’” She took a bigger bite and spoke with her mouth full. “My name is Nevaeh. That’s Heaven spelled backwards. I’m six, and I’m on summer vacation.”
Maybe if he ignored her, she would become bored and go away. Matty turned his head toward the curtained window, nearly igniting a migraine. A lightning bolt of pain shot down the side of his neck into his shoulder. He inhaled sharply, not wanting to display his newest form of agony with theatrical groans.
Every day since he checked himself into hospice by order of the parish priest, Fr. Tomás, his pain increased. He wasn’t like human hospice residents whose pain often faded as death neared, even in the midst of starvation. Matty’s vampiric body would torture him worse and worse until he succumbed to the temptation to feed or the Lord saw fit to take him home.
Already, he had miraculously survived more than 100 days by daily consumption of His Blood. He received His Body too, another miracle considering he hadn’t been able to consume solid food in over 400 years. Other than that, he ate and drank nothing.
“What’s your name?”
It had been foolish to think that the inquisitive little chit would leave him in relative peace. Warily, Matty glanced at the stream of light illuminating part of the floor. As he suspected, it was the middle of the day. At least the sun wouldn’t hurt him as he lay in bed. The staff had made sure of that by installing thick curtains.
Still, the time of day instinctively made him shudder. With effort, he turned his head again to regard the girl, if only to distract himself from his unease about the sun.
“My name is Matty.”
Nevaeh wrinkled her nose. “Maddy? That’s a girl’s name.”
Matty wondered if God sent this annoying child to his room during the most brutal time of day for a reason. Was she some kind of test to help him exercise the Christian virtue of forbearance? If she was, Matty supposed he would have to be good natured about her presence. But the cramps in his legs didn’t make kindness easy.
“My name is Matty, spelled with two t’s. That’s a boy’s name.”
Nevaeh pursed her lips and then licked her orange cream bar a couple of times. “How old are you?”
Despite his ever-increasing hunger resembling an internal implosion, Matty couldn’t help being amused by Nevaeh’s impertinent question. She was either too young to know not to ask adults their ages or too old to care about social conventions.
“I’m 450 years old.”
Nevaeh stopped licking her treat and stared at him wide-eyed. “Wow, that’s pretty old. Older than my grandma, even.” She took a bite of her orange cream bar. A small sticky puddle of it had formed on the floor some time ago.
With supreme effort, Matty tucked the bedsheet around himself. He heard the air conditioner turn on and knew his room would become agonizingly cold within minutes. Unfortunately, his quilt lay at his feet, and sitting up to reach for it required more strength than he currently possessed. Still, he would try, no matter how much it hurt.
Panting, he hoisted himself onto his elbows. His whole body protested the effort, punishing him with throbbing shockwaves in all four limbs and sharp aches everywhere else. He barely resisted the temptation to curse himself and the heavens for his excruciating feebleness.
“Here,” Nevaeh said, giving him the quilt with her free hand. She managed to let her cream bar drip on it, but Matty didn’t care. Surprised by her charitable gesture, he forgot his agony for the briefest moment.
“Thank you,” he said, lying back down. The soft thud of his head against the pillow rattled his brain. His shoulder blades and back warred with the mattress springs beneath them. Matty ran his fingertips over the patchwork, letting the texture of the quilt’s stitches distract him from the various pangs inhabiting him.
“So, how old were you when you got turned?” Nevaeh said after a long silence, startling him. Anyone young enough to wear a side ponytail shouldn’t have had an inkling of such things.
“Child, what do you know about getting turned?”
“My name is Nevaeh,” she said, obviously irritated with being called “child.”
“Forgive me, Nevaeh.” Offering an apology while slowly dying had to be among the worst Christian trials. Matty often wondered how the martyred saints not only asked for forgiveness in the midst of torture but extended it to their assailants. He would meditate upon this during his next Rosary.
“So, how old were you?”
Matty wondered if he should entertain this line of conversation with a six-year-old. Frankly, he didn’t want to discuss anything with the air conditioner running. Unable to generate much heat from a prolonged lack of nourishment, Matty shivered violently, despite the bedsheet and quilt covering what remained of his frail form.
“I was 21,” Matty said, trying to distract himself from the polar chill permeating his bed coverings. “But how do you know about turning?”
“My brother, Raphael, knows everything about vampires. He’s eight-and-a-half. Actually, he’s eight-and-three-quarters, but I forget sometimes.” Nevaeh chomped on her orange cream bar, likely aware that she better hurry up and finish before the rest of it became a sticky puddle.
“He wanted to be a vampire for Halloween, but Mom wouldn’t let him. She said that it was bad to want to be a vampire, even in pretend. So, Raphael decided to be a fruit bat instead. That way, he still got to wear the fangs that George gave him at school, because fruit bats have fangs too. And Mom couldn’t really argue with that.”
Nevaeh’s talk of fangs brought attention to the white-hot torment in Matty’s own fangs that hadn’t pierced flesh in 104 days. “Your mother’s right.” Matty closed his eyes for a moment, bracing himself against an incoming wave of abdominal pain. “It’s bad to be a vampire, even in play.”
“So, how come you’re a vampire then?”
Matty clutched his quilt, as though doing so could ease his myriad of afflictions. His belly acted like it was trying to suck itself into oblivion, and his spine felt like it was being ground into fine powder. He swallowed, his throat scratching and burning like it was full of sawdust. Tears threatened to form.
Matty often cried from all the merciless physical and emotional hurt that increased each day, but he did his best not to show the extent of his suffering to visitors and staff. Even before he repented, he never liked to upset anyone. Besides, he wanted to offer his hidden grief for the Holy Souls in Purgatory. After all, he must have put so many people into that horrid place when he fed upon them.
“Did you get bitten by a cursed vampire bat, like in the movie Curse of the Night Bat?”
Matty hadn’t seen Curse of the Night Bat, but he had certainly heard of it. He also knew that its content was questionable for a six-year-old at best. Moreover, it was just a fantasy.
“No, I wasn’t bitten by a bat. I was bitten by a vampire.” Matty sighed, remembering how Helewis deceived him. He used to lament how if he hadn’t sinned in the first place, she never would have had a chance to turn him. But that was unproductive, so he prayed for her soul instead.
Nevaeh wiped her mouth on her sleeve and then resumed munching on her half-eaten-half-melted orange cream bar. “Did you want to be a vampire?”
“No, never. But I…” Matty stopped himself from saying he didn’t have a choice. While he certainly didn’t choose to be turned, he did choose to partake in sins of the flesh that left him vulnerable to Helewis’s attack in the barn. Of course, he wasn’t going to tell a six-year-old that.
Still, he figured he better offer some age-appropriate explanation for his turning because Nevaeh was sure to ask. And as long as Matty kept talking, maybe he wouldn’t notice the frigid temperature of the room, or that it was the middle of the day, leaving him extra fatigued and anxious.
“You see, the vampire who turned me wanted to keep me forever as her… Well, I guess you could say she wanted me to be like a fairy tale prince who never got old.” Worried he might have made his unexpected transformation sound too glamorous, he added, “But that was a very bad thing because vampires… Well, I guess you know how vampires eat.”
“Yeah, they drink people’s blood.”
Hearing the truth from one so young unleashed vile memories of his 450 years of terror. Convincing himself he wasn’t truly evil, he fed from condemned criminals, mortally wounded soldiers on battlefields, rogues, and random persons of seemingly little importance.
He never attacked children, people he befriended, or anyone he bedded. But every one of his victims had an immortal soul and a gift of life that wasn’t his to take, even when those lives were near their natural end anyhow. Sobs of profound regret threatened to wrack Matty’s body and soul, but he held back. Once his little visitor left, he would funnel that overflowing river of sorrow into prayer.
“Mom said you don’t feed off of people anymore.” Nevaeh finished her cream bar but held on to the stick, even though there was a garbage can in the room. “So, you’re pretty much dying.”
Somehow, Nevaeh’s lack of tact made him smile. The corners of his lips cracked, one more little source of penitential pain. “Yes, Nevaeh. I’m dying from starvation because it’s wrong to feed from people. Only God sustains me now.”
Nevaeh opened her mouth like yet another question wanted to pop out of it, but Paula, one of the nurses, entered the room.
“Nevaeh,” Paula said, taking her hand, “I’ve been looking all over for you. You know you’re not supposed to go into residents’ rooms. Matty, I’m so sorry if my daughter disturbed you. I thought she was downstairs in the kitchen. It’s summer break, and I wasn’t able to get a babysitter today. Plus, we don’t have air conditioning at home, and with this record heat, I-”
“It’s all right, Paula. We had a nice visit.”
“Yeah,” Nevaeh said, nodding. “Matty’s really nice for a vampire.” She smiled at Matty, who returned her joyful expression despite undergoing his own private purgatory.
“That’s fine, dear, but we need to go downstairs to let Matty rest now. Vampires need to sleep during the day.”
“Okay.” Nevaeh stretched out the word in resignation, her smile suddenly replaced with a pout. “But can we at least bring Matty an extra blanket? He’s been shivering.”
Paula’s mouth flapped like a fish out of water. “Oh, yes. Of course. Sorry, Matty, I should have realized that the air conditioning would be hard on you. I’ll come back in just a minute with another blanket.”
“Take your time,” Matty said, strangely warmed by Nevaeh’s attentiveness to his needs. “I planned on saying a Rosary before going back to sleep.”
Breaking away from her mother’s grasp, Nevaeh skipped over to Matty’s nightstand.
“I know it’s not like in the movies,” Nevaeh said, handing him his Rosary. “Touching a Rosary isn’t going to make you burst into flames. And the sun just really, really hurts instead of turning you into a pile of ash.”
Matty held back an amused laugh, not wanting to hurt Nevaeh’s feelings. No matter what the time period, children disliked when adults laughed at their sincerity.
“All right, that’s enough,” Paula said, taking Nevaeh’s hand again. “Say goodbye to Matty now.”
“Okay,” Nevaeh said in that childish drawl again. “Goodbye, Matty. I’ll pray for you so you can go to Heaven soon. Don’t worry. I don’t think it’ll be much longer now.”
Paula tugged Nevaeh toward the door, probably embarrassed that her daughter had no filters. At this point in his torturous transition from undead existence to totally dead, Matty found the six-year-old’s candor oddly refreshing.
“Goodbye, Nevaeh,” he said. “And thank you for your prayers.”
When Paula and Nevaeh left the room, Matty made himself as comfortable as possible. Everything still hurt, the air conditioning practically blew right through him, and the light peeking through the thick curtains continued to induce anxiety, but he had gained enough strength to muddle through another day.
Although Nevaeh seemed convinced that he didn’t have long to live, Matty honestly had no idea how much longer he would survive. In the meantime, he thanked God for sending him a little slice of backwards Heaven to make the journey easier.
This story was originally published in the anthology, High Stakes and Bloody Business, which supports the charity Bat Conservation International.
Editor's Notes
At first glance, "Starving for Salvation" might strike readers as a simple, albeit affecting piece of vampire fiction. The reason we were keen to publish it, however, was due to how it genuinely explores spiritual suffering and redemption. Upon closer examination, you can see how the story actually works on multiple levels. It's religious allegory, yes. But also subversive genre fiction doing extra work as a melancholic character study.
The story's central conceit grabbed us right away. A vampire using Catholic Eucharist as literal sustenance while starving himself to death as penance is both theologically provocative and narratively compelling. Matty survives on "His Blood" daily, as in the consecrated wine becomes actual life-sustaining nourishment for a creature who feeds on blood.
The story takes the doctrine seriously while using it in ways traditional theology wouldn't endorse, thus creating a productive tension. For once, the vampire isn't hiding from the Church. He's dying under its care.
The prose excels at rendering Matty's suffering visceral without becoming gratuitous. The 103-day timeline is specific and weighty. And Nevaeh's presence as the emotional and thematic anchor is quietly masterful. Her backward-heaven name might seem a little overly writerly at first, but take for example the detail that she "licked rather than bit" her popsicle. It subtly mirrors Matty's own careful relationship with consumption and restraint.
Overall, the story succeeds because it takes both its Catholicism and its vampire mythology seriously. There's a true friction within the seemingly simple allegory where Matty is literally undead and literally starving while literally sustained by transubstantiated blood.
What makes this work as literature rather than tract is that the suffering remains suffering. There's no triumphant conversion moment, no angelic visitation. Just a dying monster, a curious child, and the slow working of grace through ordinary kindness. And a shared moment of human connection across the boundary between living and dead. — Jon Negroni
E.J. LeRoy is a Pushcart Prize nominated writer whose work has appeared in several publications including The Carrier Bag, Fiction on the Web, Horrific Scribes, Neon Dystopia, and NonBinary Review. LeRoy also published the novelette Fusion and has a science fiction novella forthcoming at The Whumpy Printing Press in March 2026.
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