where the air is still » open

Sammy was going to kill her, or at least get angry and glare at her. No, she wasn’t doing this to give her older brother a heart attack (although she was sure that he’d claim one when she got back), she was doing it to get a little bit of peace. As much as she loved the big oaf, there were things he didn’t understand. Even when she’d been in college and pretending to be human, she’d taken time to be apart from them. It wasn’t because she felt different or felt that she was going to forget that she was indeed a vampire. In fact, it was quite the opposite. She wanted to be human and she wanted to feel the same and some days, to do that, she had to go out and be a little different in her own corner of the world. It was a sanity check, a point along the way where she could find a little bit of quiet.

And so today, rather than staying in the camp like she was expected to, she did as she did every now and again and left. She’d hung a sign on the library door that she was out for the day and headed into the woods. Her day there had started with a little squirrel hunting to keep the balance between blood and food in her system. She didn’t understand why Sam felt he always had to get the human stuff for her. She could just as well live off of the squirrels and she told him so, often. She wasn’t as helpless as he liked to believe, although she’d had few enough chances to show him that since she’d been in the camp. Most of the things that had happened were her overreaching when trying to help someone with something and ending up curled up in her bed with a cup of soup and waiting for the pain to leave and the energy to come back. She didn’t like being the damsel in distress, but somehow it apparently came naturally to her.

Now, she was seated under the branches of an old tree around which the snow had receded, leaving a mostly dry patch where she could sit down and eat the lunch that she had brought with her. Food, as usual, was scarce in the camp, but the sandwich she had wheedled out of the stern eyed cook was delicious. It wasn’t as if it was anymore than her usual ration, but she’d wanted it to go which always got under their skin. But back to the sandwich. By some stroke of luck in this dour weather, someone had found fresh tomatoes and a little bit of spinach to spice up the day to day blandness of the meals that were served in the camp. Nothing had tasted better in a long while. Perhaps this was some move to make sure that morale was high before Sam announced a raid or something like that. Whatever the case, it was working. She chewed gently, trying to savor it and remember what fresh vegetables tasted like. Summers weren’t so bad or so lean, they could grow food in the camp then, but in winter, life was as lean as anything else.

Her sandwich completed, she leaned against the trunk and took in the sights and the sounds of the world around her. The animals were quietly shuffling through snow and the fallen leaves, looking for something to chow down on. Sometimes, she wished the world were as simple as it were in books. if she had been in a book, things would have been simpler, and as the protagonist, even if she had been scared for her life every moment of every day, at least there was a general conclusion that she would survive at the end, provided her story wasn’t written by someone with as much a penchant for killing their protagonists as George R.R. Martin or Brandon Sanderson. She’d rather her life not be written by them, no sir, she wanted to know that she’d be alive on the other side of the story.

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note: yay!
words: 691
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