Excerpt: The Most Fail Vampire Story to Ever be Written, or, How I Learned to Embrace the Run-On

There were many places to go in town if one wanted to be alone. There were hiking trails cobwebbing through town that were used rather infrequently, and even in the woods surrounding town the wildlife was sparse. In the summer there were the occasional squirrels and raccoons, sometimes even deer would wander through them, but they never stayed very long. During the cold months, the forest slept and if one wanted to be alone, the only company provided by the forest was naked trees and decaying leaves. Louanne’s Diner was never a place to be alone, too many nosy townfolk bored with their own lives to permit any solitude, but the little café right around the corner, the one the summer tourists frequented because it served all the fashionable lattes and machiattos, didn’t get a whole lot of patrons in the winter. It was a good place for escape as long as one didn’t mind soft jazz and overpriced, fancy coffee drinks. The café hosted a poorly attended open mic night on Tuesdays, so on the coldest winter Tuesdays anyone wishing to be alone had to do so in his or her own residence.
There were also some nice places to feel pathetic with a group of people. Louanne’s was always good for that, since there were no bars or liquor stores in town but still a fair number of the type of man who likes to have a neighborhood bar in which to sit all afternoon and lament on how his life had failed him, and sit all evening and grouse about how this place was impossible for meeting a nice lady friend to take home for the night or for the winter or for the entirety of eternity. Then there was the church, which worked completely differently than Louanne’s, but managed to make a complete circle so the two places could meet in sorrow on the other side. It was a tiny, non-denominational affair, as there weren’t enough people in town to afford to be picky about the belief system. The forty or so regular attendees met Sunday mornings and Wednesday night, and most attended bible studies on Mondays and Fridays. They’d had one scheduled for Tuesdays for a long time, but cancelled it in support of Daylin Lee’s open-mic night, that still nobody went to even though there wasn’t a bible study anymore. The parishoners never would have admitted to themselves that church was a great place to go when one wanted to feel pathetic, but being a sinner in a town of sinners and trying to repent to a god that never seemed to be paying attention and failing to convince the other sinners that they should also be trying their luck at repenting was a pathetic act, indeed.
If one wanted to feel alone, the kind of alone that coiled around the heart and lungs until it felt like one’s insides were getting sucked through an atomic worm hole, and also wanted to feel so pathetic that tears wouldn’t come out because a flea had no tear ducts and it was impossible to imagine that a human being could ever be this pathetic, there was only one place to go: the park bench outside of town, right next to the city limits sign. The bench was an old wrought iron monstrosity, one that got so cold that the only way to sit in it was to feel so emotionally numb that the sensation carried through to the physical body. There was no maintenance done to the area around the bench, no flowers or sidewalks, no parking spot even except for the rut in the grass made by cars stopping next to the bench for a spell. The sign next to the bench was the simple government funded reflective green board, with no additional information except for the population of 1,184.