No one can fathom what it means to live forever. It’s akin to something like insomnia, where time bleeds together in a long string of continuous torture: history unfolds, cycles of life begin and snuff out, and the earth turns. But I remain a relic: forgotten, passed over, and unchanged. I didn’t choose my fate. I never wanted it. I’ve always been a lonely creature because I dare not share my curse with another.

Not that I could now.

Bombs dropped, cities fell, and nuclear winter blanketed the world with snug suffocation. I suppose it was only a matter of time. This species I’ve always admired, with their glorious ingenuity, diversity, and passion, have ultimately destroyed themselves. Civilization crumbled in under a month, mass extinction of the world’s beauty occurred globally in a slow, mournful, united death cry. Immortality forced me to watch it all. All the delicious souls in their perfect fragility becoming nothing but grains of sand in a toxic wasteland they once called home. Radiation poisoning is a horrific way to die, but so are exposure, starvation, and hopelessness. I often feel the effects of these, but they’re more like a buzzing gnat around my face—annoying but not deadly.

There are no others left like me. I no longer hear the pulse of their blood—the almost tangible sound, like the heartbeat of the wind—that others like myself produce. It came to a halt a handful of years after the calamity. I assume most blew up with the bombs and those remaining took their lives. Fire is the only sure way to destroy the damned. But I simply can’t bring myself to take my own life. I’ve always appreciated change. I need to be here to see what happens next, if anything.

Patches of humanity survived for years in underground bunkers: safe havens built by governments, the ridiculously rich, or crude, single-purpose doomsday shelters scraped together by loose-screwed conspiracy theorists who were just waiting for the end. This is where humanity thrived.

At least for a while.

But I have to hunt, eat. It is the most basic necessity, after all. It’s not my fault humans are my favorite and I choose habit over scurrying animal. I’ve never been a fan of rats, although they are the most abundant, resilient creatures still around, right next to cockroaches, which are not edible.

We are a monster of habit, of refined tastes.

The last human I encountered was an old, old man some thirty years after the world fell. He was too frail to move away from me when I approached, the shock of my appearance clear as glass through his eyes. I’m young and unblemished, hard as stone, unmovable, same as I’ve always been. The thoughts that broke through his mind when my fangs sank into his pulsing artery were not of who or what I was, but about the snow falling around him and the beautiful nature of its simplicity. He wept. So did I. I’d killed...

Refined Tastes