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.
