Sunshine

“I don’t suppose you’d be interested in recipes,” I said, a little wildly. “My bran and corn and oatmeal muffins are second only to cinnamon rolls in the numbers we sell. And then there’s all the other stuff, lots more muffins—I can make spartan muffins out of anything—and tea bread and yeast bread and cookies and brownies and cakes and stuff. On Friday and Saturday I make pies. Even Charlie doesn’t know the secret of my apple pie. I suppose the secret would be safe with you.” Charlie didn’t know the secret of my Bitter Chocolate Death, either, but I didn’t feel like mentioning death in the present circumstances, even chocolate ones.

The vampire’s eyes were half open, watching me.

“I haven’t got much more life to tell you about. I’m not a deep thinker. I only just made it through high school. I was a rotten student. I hated learning stuff for tests only because someone told me I had to. The only thing I was ever any good at was literature and writing with Miss Yanovsky.” June Yanovsky had tangled with the school board because she chose to teach a section of classic vampire literature to her junior elective. She said that denying kids the opportunity to discuss Dracula and Carmilla and Immortal Death was in the same category of muddleheaded misguided protectiveness that left them to believe that they couldn’t get pregnant if they did it standing up with their shoes on. She won her case. “I’d‘ve dropped out if it wasn’t for her, and also Charlie really laid into me about how much my mom would hate it if I did. He was right, he usually is, especially about my mom. I’d been working at the coffeehouse since I was twelve, and I went straight from part time to full time after I graduated. I’ve never done anything. The farthest I’ve been from New Arcadia is the ocean a few times on vacation when the boys were little and the coffeehouse smaller and Charlie could still be dragged away occasionally. I like to read. My best girlfriend is a librarian. But I don’t have time to do much except work and sleep. Sometimes I feel like there ought to be something…” An image of my gran formed in my memory: an image from the last time I had seen her. I had never decided whether or not it was only hindsight that made me feel she had known I would not see her again, that she was going away. Superficially she had seemed as she always had. She had said good-bye as she always had. There was nothing different about that meeting except that it had been the last. “Sometimes I feel like there should be something else, but I don’t know what it is.” Slowly I added, “That’s why I drove out to the lake last night.”

I couldn’t let the silence after that linger. “You could tell me about your life,” I said. “Er.” Life? What did you call it? “Your…whatever. You must have done lots of stuff besides…er.”

“No,” he said.

That was clear enough. I looked over my shoulder. The sun was getting up there. I looked at him again. The old-mushroom color was very bad again, and there was definitely sweat on his skin. He looked like he was dying, or he would have if he was human. He only didn’t look like he was dying because he didn’t look human.

“You could tell me a story,” he said. The words were almost gasps. Did vampires breathe?

“A—what?” I said stupidly.

“A story,” he said. Pause. “You have…little brothers. You told them…stories?”

Scheherazade had it easy, I thought. All she was risking was a nice clean beheading from some human with a cleaver. And while her husband was off his rocker at least he was human. “Oh—um— yes—I guess. But, you know, Puss in Boots. Paul Bunyan. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. The Knight in the Oak Tree. And they were always wanting stories about spacemen and laser guns. I read all of Burroughs’s Mars books and all of Quatermain’s Alpha Centauri books to give me ideas, except the women in my stories weren’t so hopeless. Nothing very—er—riveting.”

“Puss in Boots,” he said.

“Yeah. You know, fairy tales. That’s the one when the cat does all this clever stuff to help his master out, so his master winds up really important and wealthy and marries the princess, even though he was only the miller’s son.”

“Fairy tales,” he said.

“Yes.” I wanted to ask him if he hadn’t been a child once, that surely he remembered fairy tales. Surely every child got told fairy tales. Or if it had been that long ago that he couldn’t remember. Or maybe you forgot everything about being human once you were a vampire. Maybe you had to. In that case how did he know I would’ve told my brothers stories? “There are lots of them. Snow White. Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty. The Twelve Dancing Princesses. The Frog Prince. The Brave Little Tailor. Jack the Giant Killer. Tom Thumb. My brothers liked the ones best that had the least kissing in them. So they liked Puss in Boots and Jack the Giant Killer rather than Cinderella and Snow White, who they thought were all glang. I agreed with them actually.”