Despite the late hour, but just as he expected, Josh hears a light knock on his front door. When he opens the door, he sees a strikingly beautiful woman who smiles familiarly, before asking if she can come inside.

Months of preparation and training had not prepared him for the unnatural pounding of his heart in his chest, as he invites the vampire inside.

____________________________________

When I was a kid, old people (the old people of those days, anyway) used to say that “nothing good happens after midnight.” Now that I am an old person of this present era, I think the phrase is more accurate than not.

One of the things that I like about writing in the super-short story format is that it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Is this woman a literal vampire? Does she just look like one? Is this a metaphor for inviting trouble into your house? What did he mean by training? Is the POV character an insane person about to do harm to someone? Is he a sane person about to try doing harm to someone supernatural? Does he mean no harm at all and he in fact trained for, uh, something else. You can kind of choose your own adventure.

The culture had a big vampire phase, a few years back. I still see it in some of the book smut (no offense) that some of my fellow bloggers review, but it does feel as though we hit peak vampire around the time that Twilight had them glittering in sunlight and it’s been a return to the blood-drinking mean since.

The vampire lore always seems to evolve to meet the needs or demands of the present-day culture. Depending on when you lived, throughout history, they were ugly and terrifying, or they were attractive and seductive. Sometimes male, sometimes female. It’s a very versatile baddie, to tell you the truth. One bit of lore that usually transfers and holds, with the changing of the times, is that you have to invite a vampire inside your home before it will enter. There’s something metaphorical or spiritual about that. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, though, unless some even higher power is allowing the vampire to roam, but limiting their terror to that condition.

There does seem to be a permanent anxiety in humanity toward this type of supernatural enemy – as if we have some kind of shared ancestral memory giving us warnings. Or maybe it’s just practical wisdom, collected over eons of human behavior. You probably don’t have to find out if vampires are real things to worry abut, though, provided that you don’t go looking for trouble, and you don’t invite it in.