Not If You Were the Last Vampire on Earth Read Online Free Page B

Not If You Were the Last Vampire on Earth
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out of my prescription pill stupor, I realized I needed to do something or else I risked falling back into another one. I needed a purpose. A reason to live. Day-to-day activities with an end goal in mind.
    That’s when I started “attending” the University of Arizona. Psychology became an interest of mine that was soon eclipsed by sociology. I started out trying to pick my own brain. Trying to cure my own depression. Trying to make sense of my new reality. But it spiraled into a major question: How does a person robbed of society function? I began to study the social science, finding it fascinating and horrifying at the same time.
    By nature, humans are social. I was destined to wither away. I was unable to define myself because I had no one with which to measure that definition. I was nothing because I had no one to be something to.
    I refused to believe I was it. I had to hope there was another lost soul out there or else what was the point of my existence? So before there were daily pop song phone calls, there was painting.
    The dogs and I would canvas neighborhoods, scouting homes. When I found a safe one (meaning probably no rotting corpse to greet me inside), I explored its hearth. I learned about the occupants. I studied their last moments. One house had a box of Wheaties sitting open on the table with a bowl and two spoons. An untimely end most likely. Ran outside to investigate some funny business perhaps and got clocked by one of the gangs or received terrible news and never made it back home.
    Another house had all the preparations of death in the home. Good bye letters, a rosary laid out on a pillow, everything tucked neatly into place.
    I poked through personal belongings, read yearbooks, laid out outfits from their closets on the bed. I poured through photo albums and I sat in the driver’s seat of their cars. I spent hours, sometimes days in the shoes of their lives.
    And then I painted.
    I told their story in strokes of color, adding images that repeated in their mementos. Gloria loved daisies. I saw patterns of it in her wallpaper, they dotted her dinnerware, she doodled them in her journal. I wore her daisy barrette as I painted her life in loud blues over softer ones. She was a dreamer. She read stories about horses and falling in love, she worked as a graphic designer. She kept ticket stubs and flower cards from first dates with small notes on what she thought of them. Sadly, I didn’t see evidence that one of the men stuck. She loved her mother and her brother, both of whom lived in Seattle. Her friends were plentiful. Her refrigerator calendar had held a full schedule in the earlier months before the dates dropped off in all the melee of The Sweep. She even doodled daisies there, in the corners of February and March. Her journal revealed ambitions and what-ifs and happily-ever-afters. She was beautiful: late twenties, light blonde, a lithe figure that could’ve gotten lost in the chaos when the days were grim.
    When I completed her painting, I hung it over the mantle of her fake fireplace in the center of her home. I stamped this place with her essence. I tried to do her life justice.
    I felt peaceful. If anyone ever walked through this home again, they could see my interpretation of Gloria.
    This is how I spent my days and sometimes I almost forgot I was alone. These people I experienced were so real to me, it felt like they were out shopping or at work and they could come home any minute and find me snooping. When the painting was done, I left and I never came back. It was for someone else to discover.

Chapter 9
     
    Her
     
     
     
     
     
    “I’m Picard, you’re Riker.”
    I huffed indignantly. “Why can’t I be the captain?”
    “Because you’re Number One.”
    I scowled. Clever play on Picard’s nickname for his first officer. “Are you ready yet?” I asked, choosing to change the subject rather than concede that he had me stumped for a comeback.
    “Wait. Got it. I have season
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