The woman comes to the Wal-mart, alone, on a windy evening. The door to the box-store separates for her automatically when it senses her human movements, and she shivers in the vestibule. She is very tired, but still she smiles and nods when Albert the greeter says hello, grinning with his strange teeth. She pulls a shopping cart free, and goes shuffling down the aisles, each full of every commodity imaginable, all stacked atop each other like the towers of some cliffside gothic castle.

She only has twenty dollars cash remaining in her coat pocket. It was given to her by Sandra from the community center, who had just that afternoon also invited the woman to live in her house, now that her mother had at last kicked her out for good. Whether the money was a loan or gift is still not altogether clear to the woman. However, the distinction does not matter. Deep down she knows she does not intend to ever repay it.

"My spare room isn't much bigger than a closet, but this is to help you make it feel like it's yours," Sandra had announced, when she pressed the crumpled bills into the woman's hand, "Get yourself a new little dresser, some sheets, and whatever else it will take. I'll help you set it up tonight after work."

Sandra's kindness had initially measured over two hundred dollars. Alongside the spare room, it was all such a gesture that the woman quickly realized she had no concept of how to respond, so she just stuttered a thank you, and then hugged her savior for over five seconds. She told Sandra that she had already become a second mother to her, who, unlike her real mom, understood addiction, and how when people stumble, they need compassion and support, rather than an eviction, and an oath to no longer enable. The woman promised not to waste the opportunity Sandra had given her. But even though she believed at the time that she had meant what she promised, before she was even a mile from the community center, she found herself detouring on her way to the Wal-mart, over to the park where the men in the puffy jackets are always sitting on the same bench. Soon enough, almost all Sandra's money was gone. And now, meandering through the endless Wal-mart aisles, stuffed full everything a human being could ever covet, the woman encounters the sheets and the small dressers, and the prices on them. She begins to cry.

"Are you alright, miss?" Albert the greeter asks, mincing toward her. He is very old and his skin is quite pale, even under the fluorescent Wal-mart lights. Usually the woman would lie to a stranger and send him along after being asked this sort of question. But, with Albert, for some reason she does want to dismiss him so summarily. Perhaps it is the lilt in the frail man's voice or perhaps it is just the frantic desperation of her situation; regardless, the woman feels compelled to tell him an intimate truth.

"I think I just ruined the last chance I had at a decent life," she says, wiping her nose on her sleeve, "All because I can't control myself. All because I'm a fucking vampire who just can't stop consuming and hurting people."

She goes on to unburden herself to Albert, as if he was a priest, with the kitchenware aisle for his confessional. She tells him about the drugs, how it began with the cooks and other waitresses all reeking of garlic after too-long shifts in the restaurant, how it migrated to parties on the weekends, and then to alleyways and abandoned buildings, how her mother would inspect her forearms with a flashlight and lock up her purse at night, how she went to the meetings, but spent most of it on her cell phone, until it was her turn to speak, when she would stand before the crowd and just lie. She tells Albert about Sandra, and how she doesn't even know what she is doing in the fucking Wal-mart since she has no money left and will never again be able to look that saintly woman in the eyes.

"Well, if you're a vampire, then I'd say you're in the right place," Albert tells the woman, stroking her back gently, "Everyone in Wal-mart is a vampire in one way or another, just insatiably consuming all this garbage. But, you know, maybe being a vampire is the highest, best thing anyone can be these days. So maybe you should just stop fighting against what you really are."

The woman chuckles a little. The old man is more pragmatic than she would have expected. "That's all well and good, but it won't exactly help me find a place to sleep tonight, now will it?" she asks.

"Oh I don't know about that," Albert responds, "I think if you really wanted to, you could still find a way to lay your head at that Sandra lady's place, and I think you could do it without having to ever admit your little slip up to her. Tell me, do you think Sandra has a welcome mat outside her house? If not, this Wal-mart's got a lovely selection of welcome mats, and plenty of them are cheaper than twenty bucks. Maybe all it will take for you to get yourself into Sandra's house tonight is laying down a welcome mat beside her door."

The woman looks at Albert with a furrowed brow. "Okay now you're not making any sense, what does a welcome mat have to -"

Albert puts his wrinkled, liver spotted finger on her lips. He leans in and whispers in her ear. Her eyes go wide.

Source: first top-level non-bot comment from r/WritingPrompts.