Someone's in Trouble

Driving on Houston Levee, I spotted a trail of men's clothing littered along the side of the road. As I drove by, I snapped a quick photo and wondered what the poor sap did?

I pictured some angry woman tossing his clothes out after a night of gallivanting with some other woman. Perhaps, he made some snide remark about her weight gain. Whatever it was, I'm sure it's a story waiting to be written, so I wrote it. Here goes.

Vampire Protection

by Joyce P. Lansky

He didn’t expect her to be waiting behind the front door when he flung the thing open with an echoing bang from the wood hitting the wall. Nor, did he expect those eyes––eyes that might have belonged to an angry bull with smoke steaming from the nostrils. Her ratted brown hair falling across her face failed to conceal the anger of a woman.

         “Where have you been?” She bit into her lip as she always did when problems got the best of her.

         Being too stinking drunk to imagine he could put a coherent sentence together, he stumbled into the entry hall and tossed his coat on the arm of the sofa. A smoky stench radiated from his body and filled the room.

         “I’m talking to you.” Her screeching voice bounced off him like a rubber ball hitting concrete. He didn’t look, flinch, or utter, but rather shook his head, “No,” gave a quick wave, and stumbled toward the bedroom.

         “You’re drunk! Stinking drunk with a chain of hickies dotting your neck.”

         “It’s a, it was a, I met a vampire. Yeah. On the way home from the bar, he tried to bite me but couldn’t break through my super strong underwear.” The man reached into his drawer and pulled out a pair of green boxers with tiny shamrocks surrounding leprechauns drinking beer. “Thank goodness I had my clothes or I would be dead right now.”

         “So, let me get this straight? Your underwear is keeping you alive by keeping vampires from biting your neck?”

         “Yep. Underwear, shorts, t-shirts, all those things keep me alive.”

         The woman snatched a variety of the man’s clothes from his dresser and tossed them out the window onto Houston Levee. “Not anymore,” she said.