The ceiling fan had a pleasant sort of vibrating noise if she really, really tuned into it. Most of the time, she just flicked it on and went off to sleep so she didn’t immerse herself in the noise. It was good though, a kind of a buzz that echoed in her mind and made her feel sort of calm and easy. Watching the fan was good too. You’d think it would make her dizzy to watch it but it didn’t really work that way, it just kind of mezmerized her until she let everything else slide right out of her brain. She wasn’t worried about getting her painting done on time, she wasn’t concerned about her mother visiting later this week, she was just all about that fan.

She had always been like this when she was stressed. She would work herself up into some sort of frenzy, be on the edge of some sort of breakdown and just when things were most painful, when her breath was jutting out of her in shards, she would suddenly focus on one small thing and the stress would just melt away. Today it was the fan, but at other times it had been a bird building a nest in the tree outside her childhood room, the front-end loader at a construction site, the water over a pile of rocks in the river at the park. She still had a scar on the back of her thigh from where she had gotten so close to the rocks, listening to the splashing, watching the light tumble, that she had tumbled over backward and landed hard on more rocks behind her.

It would be easier if she could just paint, she knew that. She had the canvas ready, she had the paint prepared, but she couldn’t bring herself to lift the brush. Those first strokes were the beginning of failure and she couldn’t bear to see another painting fall so far short of what she could see in her mind’s eye.

It was ridiculous. She knew that. There was never any way to get her vision directly out in the world, she had to keep trying so she could get closer and closer. They had told her that in art school. Her therapist had echoed it, and her mother tried to coax her through the process every time she saw her. They never talked about the pain of it though, that’s why she didn’t quite believe what they said about how to get past it. They spoke as though it were easy to fail, easy to paint her heart over and over, forgiving herself for not matching her own visions. It hurt more each time. It wasn’t getting easier to fail, it was getting harder to start.

She let the buzz of the fan ease her into a daydream where she worked in an office and she had a straightforward list of things to get done today and her vision could easily match her reality. She would fail at that too, though, because she was not designed for lists and realities, she was made of ideas and colours. So she drifted into another daydream- one with birds’ nests and trickling water.

When she woke, she pulled herself off the bed and right into her studio. As always, the only thing worse than the pain of failing with her art was the pain of not creating it at all.

(Today’s prompt from Story A Day was to write in the second person. Let’s see how that goes.)

You look down at him, kneeling in front of you, ring held aloft and you struggle to remember how you got here.

He is earnestly waiting for his answer, the whole restaurant is watching you, and you feel that familiar heat crawling up your neck. How can one person get things wrong so very many times?

You know it’s not your fault, you can’t do what you haven’t learned, but why does your inability to read other people always have to end in such public disasters?

You don’t want to hurt Ronald, of course, but you definitely don’t want to marry him. You don’t even want to pretend you are going to marry him.

This is your worst nightmare coming true, you feel like you have shown up without your skin, exposed and raw and meaty. Why didn’t you notice that he seemed to be needing you more and more? Why didn’t you hear his talk about the future? You can’t remember hearing anything of the sort, of course, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Subtlety isn’t your strong point and sometimes you miss even the most obvious things. You don’t beat yourself up about it anymore but you haven’t found a solution either.

How are you going to get Ronald up off the floor without making a scene? Is there any way to do it? Can you save face, his face, at all?

One part of your brain starts forming an elaborate escape plan involving climbing up through the ceiling tiles and changing your identity and all manner of ridiculousness but another part wants to shoot straight.

Without even consciously choosing to speak, you hear yourself saying ‘Ronald, you know I don’t like spectacle. Please get up off the floor so we can leave.‘

His face crumbles like it was a first draft, a paper ball of dismay, and you feel a twinge of guilt. Not enough to make you change your mind but enough to make you wish, again, that you knew how to handle these things better.

You look at him and look around at the other diners, all of whom are intently studying their meals, and you realize that you don’t want to make better with Ronald, you just want to get out of there. Maybe you didn’t see the clues leading you both here but he’s the one that chose to make the grand gesture, to make it public. He’s the one who didn’t read YOU well enough to know what you would want. He just assumed that you would go along with whatever he wanted.

Now the heat crawling up your neck is fueled by anger. How dare he treat you like this? You open your mouth to start shouting but you shut it again quickly. You don’t need to take this any further, you simply turn and walk toward the door.

You can hear him calling out to you from behind but you square your shoulders and head out into the rain, alone. Your head feels clear and your body feels light, the rain doesn’t bother you in the least.

In all the old stories, they used holy water to ward off vampires. She couldn’t get behind that though. She wasn’t a believer, so she didn’t think trying to invoke the Christian God would work for her. She had the next best thing though, a hip flask full of wine. Most of the holy moments in her life had featured wine – weddings, funerals, and moments of friendship where you met souls instead of people – so she figured that was a close to a blessed fluid as she was likely to come across. She wasn’t sure if it would work but she had to put her faith somewhere.

Sometimes, they could go ages between attacks but this past month the creatures had been coming week after week. It was just wave after wave of them, and her team had been out in full force. Sean had fallen prey to them last week. Maddie and Jason were both injured after a battle with a particularly strong vamp, so she was the only one to stand between this wave of vampires and the people sleeping in the village just beyond.

So far, the wine was just back-up. Her stakes had been working just fine, but she had a limited supply. It wasn’t like on Buffy when the vampires would disintegrate and leave her holding the sharpened wood to use again. That wasn’t how it worked in the real world. Jillian had to pry the stake loose each time or the vamps wouldn’t go to dust at all. And there wasn’t always time for prying, mostly she had to run on to battle the next one before the adrenaline from the last fight had faded.

She was crouching on the roof of someone’s shed, watching for the steady creep of a bloodsucker. Her attention was so focus on the ground beneath that she didn’t hear the creature slide up behind her. Its hand was tilting her head to expose her neck when she threw her elbow back into its midsection. Vampires didn’t have to breathe anymore but their bodies hadn’t lost the habit of reacting to threats to human anatomy. It took a step back and she turned to face it.

It bared its teeth but the intimidation tactic had no effect on her. On the slope of the roof, she couldn’t risk losing her balance by reaching into her bag for a stake. She was going to have to try attacking with the wine. Even if it didn’t work like the water, it should at least cause enough confusion for her to grab a stake.

The vampire was sniffing the air. She heard that they could smell when you were nervous and they liked the taste in your blood. It licked one of its fangs.

Its commitment to savouring the moment before the kill gave her enough time to reach toward her hip flask and unscrew the top with her thumb. She pulled the flask from the holster, arcing the liquid toward the beast as it sprang. Every splash of wine landed with a hiss as it burned through the vampire’s flesh. She didn’t have enough to take the creature out completely, but as she had hoped, the burning distracted it enough that she could pull a stake from her bag and pierce the vampire’s heart.

This time, she was able to remove the stake and watch the corpse fall into dust. She wiped the mess from the shed roof, threw her stake back into her bag and headed out to find another bottle of wine. Perhaps she’d even get two, she could really use a drink.

She stood at the bottom of the steps. They had cleaned up most of the blood but the flooring was still stained. It was like an inkblot, the kind they used in movies but that real life patients hardly ever saw.

She thought that she would have liked to see some inkblots, see what they might have told her about her motivations. Those were apparently important. Dr. Flynn had told her that once they found her motivations, then they could start to figure out her behaviour. Her triggers. Once they knew her triggers then they could help her change. And once she changed, then she could start going out into town again.

Dr. Flynn had thought that spending time with Shelby meant that she was changing. He was counting on Shelby to help her recover, to make her better, to help her connect. They connected all right but probably not in the way Dr Flynn intended. Shelby though, she was counting on connection. She thought that they had something, that they were destined to be together.

That was never going to happen, Jane didn’t work like that. She went along with it because it got Dr. Flynn off her back, gave her a break from his questions about when she was going to make an effort to get to know people. She didn’t usually bother to get to know people because once you knew them, they got annoying. And once they annoyed you, you had to get rid of them.