Not all heroes wear capes, and not all monsters wear their hideousness on the outside, as Jean was to find out, the hard way.
Mise en scene: imagine the perfect little Irish town.
A small town centre comprising of a pharmacy, a few immediate needs shops (knitting, hardware and garden supplies), a supermarket.
Across the town square an old church which has seen better days, but it is not completely run down.
On a side street the Garda station with just a handful of guards working in it permanently. And, of course, not too far the post office.
The town does not have a fire department or a hospital. If its inhabitants need these services they need to use the ones in the county town, just twenty kilometers away.
Anyway, it is in this town, that Jean, a striking redhead in her fifties, has been living for the past ten years.
She moved here when her life too an abrupt turn, and she found herself all alone living in a Dublin city that was just too fast and too crowded for her.
Jean was lucky enough to work from home, so she decided to pack her bags and give country life a try, and you know what?! Despite the initial shock of the quiet, she found that she quite enjoyed it.
She did not do much Jean.
She worked, did some shopping, took walks in the local park, she just lived a quiet, common life, and read. Yes, Jean read.
Jean’s favorites were the romantic vampire books and the handsome, sophisticated, elegant vampires were her friends and companions. Humans, real humans, somehow, never managed to live up to the fictional vampires’ standards.
Human males, the kind Jean met in the street or in the shops, they were all uneducated, self-absorbed and smelly.
Jean yearned for a lover like the vampires she read about, clean and tidy, well groomed, who cared for her and for whom she was the center of the universe.
But, closer to sixty than fifty, Jean knew better than to hope.
Human males, real men, had already proven a disappointment quite a few times actually, so she was happy to live just with her books and her wonderful fictitious companions.
And then the doorbell rang.
When she opened the door, Jean was faced with, maybe, the most handsome man she had ever met in her entire life.
Tall, slim built, with a dazzling natural smile, beautifully combed white hair, he looked as if he had just popped out of one of those shopping center magazines.
It is so true, when people are handsome they do get what they want from the normal, romantic types.
Good there isn’t that many of them out there!
The handsomest man told Jean about this charity he was working for, and he was looking at her with such intensity, like she was a turquoise jewel on a platinum setting.
He even produced a leaflet with a bunch of details, but she wanted to hear him talk some more, she was not ready to let him go just yet, so she invited him inside for tea and biscuits.
Setting down the tea things was pretty much the last thing Jean remembered, she told the guards from her hospital bed.
She felt a sharp pain in the back of her head and then, hello darkness.
‘I am so sorry to have to tell you Mrs. Butler, they took everything that was not pinned down … well except for the books that is … they left those …’, the guard was surprised by the deep sigh of relief escaping from Jean’s being.
‘They left my books?!?’
‘Yeah … seems nowadays not even charity shops take them, so no reason to bother really …’
‘I am so sorry for your experience, we will get the thieves for sure, sadly though, I cannot say the same about your things, they might already be on a container heading to god knows where …’
Jean hurt for the loss of her belongings, but, somehow, still having her books made her feel a lot better.
Her story made the headlines, old, trusty people (old?!? Can you imagine?!) were advised against opening the door to strangers and warned against fake charities.
Jean had become a cautionary tale.
People called her lucky! The insurance paid out, the neighbors helped her put the house in order, she got herself a Ring doorbell and put cameras all around the house.
Jean went back to her quiet life, living surrounded by her wonderful vampires, and keeping out a human world that seemed more monstrous than the one in her books.