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[indent][indent][indent][color=808080]The cocoa tea took twenty minutes to make properly, and Rafael Fontenelle had not rushed a single one of them in over a hundred years. He stood at the small stove in the kitchen above Heritage Antiques, sleeves rolled to his elbows and bare feet cold on the linoleum. [color=#94260e][i]If yuh cyah make it right[/i][/color], he thought as he recalled his mother's exact words, [color=#94260e][i]doh call it cocoa tea.[/i][/color] She had been pretty adamant on that point. You could add cinnamon or a strip of orange peel. You could even use milk, water, or a combination of both, but the cacao had to be roasted properly, and the stirring had to be one direction only, and if you rushed it, you might as well drink hot water and pretend. She, however, had not been a woman who tolerated pretense in her kitchen. That was perhaps the only lesson from childhood that had survived every other loss.

The kitchen was small enough that three steps in any direction brought him to a wall. Rafael didn't mind the confines, nevertheless, as he had never needed much room. Two centuries of accumulation had filled every available surface with things that had no particular order to them: a ceramic bowl he'd had since Trinidad, glazed a colour the local potter no longer made, sat beside a pocket watch that had belonged to a gold rush prospector who never came back for it, beside a folded map of the Black Hills that was technically his own property and technically older than the tourism board that now printed newer versions of it. There was also a bundle of dried sage hung from a nail above the stove, tied with twine that had gone grey with age. A single coffee mug—chipped, unremarkable, the one he reached for every morning—sat upside down on a rag beside the sink. He poured the tea into that same cup and took a sip, the heat moving through him in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. His nerves, after his transformation, seemed to register warmth differently and were more of a remembered sensation rather than a current one.  But the flavour was real. The bitterness of the cacao. The sweetness of the milk. The bit of cinnamon on his tongue. That, at least, had never faded.

He took the cup and moved to the sitting room, settling into the leather Chesterfield. The book he'd left open on the side table the night before was exactly where he'd placed it. It was a collection of essays published in Port of Spain in 1847, the pages soft with age and handling. He picked it up without looking at it and found his page by feel. 

Meanwhile, the town was setting up outside. He could hear it through the old timber walls. Voices carrying on the cold morning air. The hollow thud of something wooden being unloaded from a truck bed. The distant crackle of a speaker being tested, a brief burst of music, then silence, then music again. Pine Ridge had done Halloween before. Small things. Porch lights and children in costumes, and the saloon doing more business than usual. He had watched that version of it for decades without much interest. But this, the sheer volume of it, was quite different. He wasn't sure yet what he thought about different, but he supposed that eventually he’d make up his mind one way or another.

He read for a while. The essays were familiar enough that his eyes moved across the pages without demanding much of him, which was partly the point. The author, a man named Álvarez, had been possessed of strong opinions about colonial governance and about the particular violence of having one's homeland described by people who had never set foot in it. He had been a difficult man, by all accounts, petty in his feuds and vindictive when crossed. But he had been right about enough things that Rafael had, in 1848, forgiven him his flaws. And he agreed with most of it today. Most. Not all. In his twenties, it was easier to believe in absolutes. In his two-hundred-and-tenth year, on the other hand, he had come to understand that most was often the best anyone could honestly claim, and that anyone who told you otherwise was either selling something or lying to themselves.

He still thought of Trinidad every so often, but he was not sure he was still of it in the way Álvarez meant. The island existed in him the way his mother's voice existed in him, in that it was foundational and yet, at the same time, entirely out of reach. He could remember the exact pitch of her laughter and the way she pronounced certain words with a softness that had no equivalent in English. But he could not have it. Not anymore. Just the same, he could not go back to a place and find it the way he’d left it after so many years. He could only go back and find out how much had changed without him. And Rafael had not been back. He could not go back. He wished he could go back.
 
The author, apparently unbothered by such complications, went on to describe Port of Spain in the dry season, like the heat settling heavily over the city in the late afternoon and the smell of the sea coming in off the Gulf of Paria when the wind shifted just enough to carry it inland. Rafael had not thought about that smell in years. He sat with the book open in his lap and did not turn the page.

The thing about memory, he had learned across two centuries, was that it did not diminish the way people assumed it would. They said time healed things. They said distance helped. What they did not say, because most of them, in fairness, did not live long enough to find out, was that memory past a certain point stopped being something that happened to you and became something you carried. Permanently and without the option of setting it down. The smell of the Gulf of Paria was still in him as precisely as it had been in his childhood years, along with his mother's kitchen and the weight of humidity against his skin in the rainy season.  Along with the sound of his infant sibling crying in the next room, the cry he had learned to distinguish from hunger or discomfort or the simple, unexplained distress of being very small in a very large world.

Outside, something crashed—a wooden panel, by the sound of it, hitting the ground with the splintering crack of cheap construction—and a collective groan rose from the street below, followed immediately by laughter. 

Rafael blinked.

The sitting room came back into focus, and he looked down at the cup in his hand and found it empty. That happened occasionally, time passing him by without him accounting for it. He had never really decided whether that was a quality of his vampirism or simply of himself. Perhaps there was no longer a meaningful difference between the two, and Rafael Fontenelle and the vampire had merged so completely across the decades that trying to separate them was like trying to separate the cacao from the tea. You could do it, in theory, but you would surely ruin both in the process.

He unfolded himself from the Chesterfield and carried the cup back to the kitchen, running cold water over it in the sink before washing it properly. Through the window above the sink, he could see a narrow strip of Main Street between the buildings opposite. Strangers mostly.  A woman with a child on her shoulders was pointing at something out of his sightline. Two men were consulting a map with expressions suggesting it was not helping. And then, at the edge of his vision, a flash of red hair moving quickly down the road, there and gone before he could try and place it.

Rafael set the cup down on the rag beside the sink and stood at the window for a moment longer than he meant to before going to grab his coat.[/color][/indent][/indent][/indent]
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