The Vampire Blues

Being a vampire is harder than it used to be. Mirrors used to be expensive, only for the rich, now whole buildings are made of them. And everyone just loves their Italian food don’t they? Smothered in garlic. Repulsive. We used to have to stand still for 20 minutes to get a picture taken. Relatively easy to avoid. Yes, modern living is problematic.

It’s not that we don’t show up in photographs, it’s that we look dead in them and nowadays everyone has a camera in their pocket. It can be quite jarring to try to take a selfie with your unconscious one-night stand only to find physical evidence that you’d just spent the night with a literal corpse. Women have run screaming.

So where have I ended up to avoid the modern madness? In a small town, doing living history, where there are no cell phones allowed and the only problem of vampirism left is the solitude. I’ve also ended up madly in love with a woman who was a librarian before she came here. A librarian that left the library because of what it was becoming. Less books, more computers. She couldn’t stand it. A woman after my own unbeating heart.

She comes to my shop sometimes for the peace. Today I could just make out the spindly branches of a tree spreading across her sketchbook. I approached and I knew she heard me because she paused in her work. “Why this today?” I asked, motioning to the smooth lines of the tree. Barren and leafless.

“Actually, it reminded me of you. Lonely.”

“You think I’m lonely?”

“I think you always have been.”

I didn’t deny it. “Would you care to help with that?”

She smiled. “I thought you’d never ask. I don’t have forever, you know.”