And it makes me kinda nuts to have 15 and 16 year olds tell me, "Oh, you'll change your mind when you get married! You'll be a good mom!"

Gah, I hate that, "you'll change your mind" or "you'll love them once you have them." I thought I had the perfect capper with, "Well, I'm in my 40s, so it's not a question anymore," but then I got the perky, "Oh, you can still have kids!"

Fortunately, I don't have many of those conversations anymore. The kind of people who want to tell me these things generally pick up on the "I'm a baby bird and she's a cobra" vibe and leave me alone.

And no, my choices are not fucking sour grapes, either, which is a Knowing Look I have gotten all too often and had to restrain myself from smacking off of people's faces before.

God yes. I hate this.

I'm having writer's block on this drabble. Too many ideas; not usually my problem.

Linden Wood

Velvet maroon lined linden box contains one wooden hammer, four wooden stakes, prayer book, crucifix, garlic, knife, holy soil, holy water, holy incense, holy oil, serums and potions.

You, oh fearless vampire hunter, brave the tuberculosis-ridden village. You tell them a vampire is behind their suffering, pick a grave. Drive a stake into the unearthed corpse’s heart, garlic and incense giving you some protection from the stink. You are long gone, pay in hand, by the time the villagers notice the deaths have not stopped.

In a time - like our own - when superstition blended with science , did you know you made a living from a cruel hoax? Or were you the first person you deceived?

Gar, add a hyphen to "tuberculosis ridden".

Other than that?

Damned near a perfect drabble. Evokes the line Harker thinks near the beginning of Dracula (mangled German coming up): Vor der toten reiten schnell - for the dead travel fast.

If I remember my German correctly (I took it in high school, eee), what that actually means is "ride fast in front of the dead." Vor is "in front of," fur (pretend there's an umlaut over the u) is "for," or "seit" could be used in the sense of "since" the dead travel... However, reiten is the verb "to ride," as a horse. In this case, reiten is used in the imperative case to the reader. Travel is a different verb, which I've totally forgotten, now.

So, still pertinent to the drabble and the line in Dracula, just a slightly different spin.

Sail, tell Bram Stoker, not me. I lifted from the novel itself, not from my German primer. (edit: as well as the translation - it's how Jonathan Harker translated it, not me)

Yo, Bram, you putz!

Nah, I figured you wouldn't be making the mistake if you knew the language, Deb. You have a rep for precision in language. Also, I figured that you remembered what was in the book verbatim, you've got the eye/brain for that or maybe ear. I just thought it was interesting that either translation works, just in a slightly different way.

Aha1 Found it. And Stoker was actually quoting - and, I believe, slightly mistranslating - from Burger's "Lenore". As written:

"Denn die Todten reiten schnell" ("For the dead travel fast")."

So I screwed up on the plural of "dead" - why is that feminine, damn it? Why isn't it "das" for neutral? - but he messed up on "reiten".

And, there you go.

Thanks Deborah. I added the hyphen, and also a comma after "pay in hand".

Thinking hard here (can you smell the gears burning?) I'm forgetting that Stoker was writing much earlier than I'm used to. His sentence is completely correct. I wasn't thinking of "for" as "in front of," but it was used that way even in English. Just not recently. So, yeah, his sentence translates correctly if you look at it in terms of how things were phrased and word usage for the time. And since almost all travel was done by or with horses, then using travel is perfectly fine. It's one of the pitfalls to reading older stories that word usage and phrasing can change so much in just 100 years. Heck, even in 20 years.

eta: Aren't I cute? Talking myself out of being right. AARRGGHH!