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| Rise up in the Falling Rain by Keith O'Neill |
Before the whole world went crazy, they hung a new set of traffic lights up at the entrance to my neighborhood, across
wrappers, they look like three body-bags strung up over the county highway. Tonight I wish they were switched on: I'm
running late and I can't stand getting to a movie after it's started. Traffic lights become lower priority in a world in which
gas stations burn for almost the entire month of June. I've got about thirty-five minutes and the theater is only ten
minutes away, but traffic isn't exactly predictable these days. Plus I've got to give Deb, my girlfriend, plenty of time to
shamble from her house to my car.
I note with some interest, sitting at the end of my road and waiting for a small convoy of military vehicles to go by, that
someone appears to have moved into the destroyed gas station. It looks like a couple has set up a makeshift shelter in
the ruined car bay. It's hard to tell between amphibious vehicles and Humvees roaring past, but it looks like the woman
is actually pregnant. I already know that Deb will tell me to take this as a good sign, that things are getting better, so I
won't bother telling her. The whole thing is a travesty of the Advent: a hydraulic lift for a manger, a melted red Texaco
sign standing in for the North Star and a monster Mary and monster Joseph completing the joke. The women's abdomen
is probably just distended. Corpses can't make babies.
I chose the word shamble on purpose. It wasn't a slip or poor usage or, worse, a poetic turn; it's the perfect description
of what Deb does when she goes anywhere: she shambles. When she walks, both her legs drag along the ground and make
a creepy sound that is a combination of dragging and thumping. My girlfriend—I’m saying this directly because my
therapist says it's good to be as direct as possible—is a zombie.
Once the convoy passes, the roads are pretty clear tonight. Usually, I can count on some kind of wreck blocking the
way, or maybe just a jam because somebody's wandered mindlessly out into the middle of the road. All I see tonight is a
truck on its side in a parking lot and what looks like some looting going on at the old Radio Shack, but, thanks to the
convoy, nothing that slows me down. It seems like I've seen so many things in the past six months that I would have
once considered horrifying or sickening. It's amazing how quickly life adjusts to change.
Pretty much the only thing that scares me these days is the cemetery. The irony is not lost on me. Now that the dead
walk the earth and are part of all of our lives again, graveyards have lost most of their mystery for the living, and yet I'll
take the long way around town to avoid it at all costs.
Whenever I get going about how things are really breaking down, society-wise, that things are getting worse, Deb always
reminds me to watch my preconceived notions-bigotry, she calls it, instilled in all of us from years and years of
propaganda against the living dead.
When I get to her place she's already in the front yard, staring at nothing and scaring all the kids on the block. Her skin is
gray and her hair looks like strands of seaweed draped over her skull. I roll down my window:
"Deb? What are you doing?"
"Ugh," she says, and I can tell this is going to be one of those nights.
"What?" I leave the car running and come around to guide her to the passenger door.
"Mnnnnh!"
"Deb? Please don't tell me your vocal cords are gone."
I bend her at the waist and guide her into the car. Even with the seat pushed all the way back, it's a little hard to get her
legs in, but I'm afraid to bend them because they might snap off. I saw that happen to an old lady at work a couple of
weeks ago. She tried sitting in one of the waiting chairs and snap! There she was in two, her legs doing scissor kicks on
the linoleum and her upper torso vertical in the plastic seat, screaming that she was going to sue the government.
I close the door for Deb and then run around the back of the car to my side. I see Deb's parents in the window looking
through the blinds, but when I wave they close them quickly. They're in total denial about Deb's condition. It's a phase,
they tell her and they can't stand me because they think that I had something to do with her becoming a zombie. ("She
was already dead when I met her!" I always say.)
“I was this close, this close, to getting the Hendersons' cat."
Deb holds up a stiff hand as if to show me a small distance between her thumb and forefinger, but she lost that kind of
dexterity in her hand a long time ago. It's okay, though. I know what she means.
"Don't you think the Hendersons would mind you eating their cat?"
She turns to look at me, which means twisting her whole stiff upper torso, "Do you think I care what those drunks think?
They're off on one of their booze cruises without even leaving a bowl of food out for the poor thing. It's so neglected
that it's practically feral. It'd be better off dead. A mercy killing, if you ask me."
I know better than to get into the sticky ethics of animal rights versus zombie rights, so I'm actually glad to see a traffic
jam on the arterial. I let it derail our conversation.
"What now?" I say. "We won't make the movie at this rate."
"Looks like a demonstration."
Sure enough, as we get closer, I see a burning car and what looks like a leg in the middle of the road. There are a couple
of dozen zombies standing around, some right in the middle of the road. One of them has blood all over her chin and
down the front of her dress.
Deb scans the crowd to see if there's anyone she knows as we slowly make it into the one lane left open. I consider
making a remark about rubbernecking but then rethink it, since Deb's neck isn't exactly flexible. Besides, she's become
very sensitive to the language I use.
There are even more zombies around the next intersection. They've filled up all of Chestnut Street.
"Looks like things got out of hand," I say. "There must have been some kind of attack."
"It's a demonstration."
"That's a mob, Deb. I wouldn't want to be out there in the middle of it."
"It's a demonstration," she repeated. "They're protesting."
How can two people sit next to each other and see two completely different things? Deb sees activism and I see, well, a
scene from a horror movie.
"Are your teeth chattering?" Deb says, as a zombie we're rolling past growls in my window.
"No, I'm just a bit cold."
"It's August," she reminds me.
You would think that being in a relationship with a zombie would be a rather
frosty experience, a bit cold, but I can attest that this isn't the case at all. In fact, I do think the issue of emotional
distance is one of our biggest problems, but the problem is all mine. When I look into Deb's dull, gray eyes, I can feel this
incredible pull from her. She wants me not just today, but for the Long Haul. She can sit and just talk and talk and talk,
for days at a time if she wanted, about our feelings for each other. And though I think I'm a pretty agreeable sort-clearly
I'm not too hung up or I'd have more of a problem dating Deb in her current state-hyper-analyzing every moment makes
me even more uncomfortable than cruising through a mob of zombies.
"There's Jerry!" she says, pointing to a zombie trying to open back door of
a school bus.
There's something else bothering me tonight, but I'm not even sure I want to
bring it up. Part of it has to do with the way that Deb has opened my eyes
and changed my way of looking at the world and part of it has to do with
zombies turning out to be real in general. More and more, lately, my mind
keeps going back to Cynthia, my wife. We met in college and got married the summer after we graduated. At first things
were perfect: with a little help
from her parents, we bought a house—the one I still live in—and we got jobs, cars, the whole deal. We talked about
having kids when we saved a little more money and we were happy for a while. But then I don't know what happened, it
was like the life just fell out of the relationship. (At this point, I can just hear Deb yelling at me to watch my biased
language. "The life being sucked out of something is not necessarily a bad thing," quoteth she.) Anyway, Cynthia and I
started fighting a lot about everything, fighting without a point over petty stuff. At other times, we barely talked. We'd
eat in front of the TV and watch our shows and then go to bed and that was about it. We forgot about having kids
completely until the day Cynthia announced that she was late. The home tests didn't come up positive, to our mutual
relief, I guess, but after another month Cynthia went to the doctor.
She wasn't pregnant, but they did find something in her: cancer throughout her uterus and ovaries and, worst of all,
spotting on her liver. Cynthia, who was rarely ill, rarely even unwell, was suddenly given six months to live.
After that, it was surgery or chemo, nearly every day. And once they started digging around in her, she was never the
same. I was very practical back then: I didn't believe in anything without absolute proof. Since I never really saw the
cancer, or any signs that Cyn was sick at all before that, I became convinced that it was the doctors that were killing her.
Of course, I understood intellectually that there was something serious and terrible happening to my wife's cells, but in
terms of really believing it, you might as well as tell me that within a few years the dead would walk the earth.
You see, I guess, how times can change a person.
The doctors may not have been lying about the cancer, but they got at least one thing wrong: Cyn died within three
months of getting the news. She was so weak and blitzed on painkillers that she didn't really know what was happening,
so we never really got to resolve anything before she went. For all I know, she died hating me for letting her down.
I mean, there technically wasn't anything wrong between us, but we both knew that something was missing before she
got sick and the thing that keeps me up at night, the thing that's worse than any of the horrors that I witness on a daily
basis these days, was whatever was missing my fault.
A lot of zombie movies are social commentaries of one kind or another-the
country's problems with race, the country's problem with consumerism, the
country's problem's with zombies, etc. I just never expected that zombies
themselves would be such big social commentators.
Every zombie I know has got an opinion. They're very cerebral. I don't think
a lot of people realize that. I think it has something to do with their bodies shutting down. That's why in all those movies
you have to shoot them in the brain. They think too much. After they've made the switch, they don't have a lot to worry
about: eating the fresh and warm flesh of the living and deliberating on what society needs to do to be better. That's it.
The movie we see tonight? A zombie flick. It wasn't my choice. Sometimes I
just want get away from the topic for a while, but Deb wants everything out
on the table at all times. Just like my therapist, who also happens to be a
zombie. I think she enjoys critiquing the inaccuracies on the screen. On the
way home I suggest that we try seeing a normal movie next time, a romantic
comedy or something.
"Define normal." Deb gives me a cold stare.
"You know what I mean."
"Yes, I think I do."
I try to explain. "Look, I'm just saying, if you know you're going to be offended, then why do we go to these things?"
"I don't really have a choice do I? Do you know any movies actually made by my people yet? It's always the living's
representation of the dead."
"I don't know. Romero had some sympathetic moments for zombies."
"Romero? Ha! He's the worst. He's like D.W. Griffith to my kind and Night of the Living Dead is Birth of a Nation."
I tell her that I think she's really exaggerating, but I think she's really got a point there.
"We're not idiots, you know," she says, attempting to roll her eyes. "The media loves to portray us as mindless, but did
you ever stop to think about how biased the mainstream media itself is?"
"Against the living dead?"
"Not just us. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, whatever."
“Oh, so now there are werewolves?"
So here's that thing that's really bothering me: If Deb is still up and around though still technically dead, what about
Cynthia? I mean, I buried Cyn, or what was left of her after the chemo, a short time before the first zombies showed up-
or went public, as Deb claims, so where does that leave Cyn?
Sometimes I lie in bed and think about her grave, really think about it and I think about Cyn six feet below the azalea
bush I planted for her and I can imagine her scratching at the lid of her overpriced coffin. I think about the weight she
lost in the harrowing last weeks of her life and I think of that terrible wig they buried her in. But mostly I just think about
the sound of her nails once they've scratched through the satin lining of her coffin.
***
Today isn't a good day at work. Truthfully, there hasn't been a good day at work since people started coming back.
Counseling at the Social Security Administration has never been a walk in the park, but now our entire system is
wrecked. It's the little things that people never thought of in those old zombie movies, like the fact that people would be
coming back from the grave not only looking for flesh; they're looking for handouts as well. The undead are very
dependent on public assistance. Deb claims that they're all collectivists, but I think they're generally the biggest bunch
of freeloaders I've ever met. Not one of them contributes to society or pays taxes and yet I have to deal every day with a
line of rotting, angry ghouls who are outraged that their social security number has been retired or even reused.
And we're not the only ones. The police are backlogged for months, processing reports from the undead on their own
murders. The courts are clogged with civil suits trying to deal with the still-unsolved problem of zombies trying to
declare their executed wills null and retrieving their estates. (When I suggest to Deb that that doesn't sound very
collectivist,
she tells me those are a vocal minority. ‘Just cause you're dead doesn't
make you stop being an asshole,’ she says.) Even churches are overflowing, a phenomenon I've never understood. You'd
think having moldered in the ground for some time without passing on to another realm would shake the foundation of
one's beliefs, but old habits die hard. (Says Deb: ‘Nothing dies, and did you ever think that Jesus, raised from the grave,
might have been some kind of zombie? Did you?’)
Just about the only profession not inundated of late, for obvious reasons, is medicine. Fatalities are a thing of the past
nowadays, or at least fatalities as we once knew them.
The result of all of this? That, much of the time, even the most bone-chilling things quickly become reduced to the
mundane. Every day is a reminder that what might be a crisis just might be another boring change.
All of which is by way of saying that things with Deb aren't going well, at all. After the movie, we did what we usually do:
we parked the car outside her parents' house and talked. The lights are off in the house, but I know her parents are
awake in there, watching us fearfully from the darkened windows.
Deb tried to start the conversation again, the one in which she attempts to convince me to convert, to switch over to the
zombie side.
"What, exactly, are you so scared of?"
"I'm not sure," I said.
"Are you afraid it will hurt?"
"Yes, sort of."
***
We drink beer on Cynthia's grave all afternoon, lining the empties neatly next to the azalea bush. The August sun dips
down beneath the trees and those clouds delivered on their threat. It starts to rain in big, warm drops that explode when
they hit the ground. Soon it's pouring, but at least the heat is finally gone.
I pick up the shovel to start the hard work of exhumation.
"Ready?" I say.
"Ready," says Deb with a gray smile standing behind me with a cold embrace.
As the shovel breaks ground on Cynthia's grave, I feel Deb's teeth break the skin on my neck, each of us, in our way,
mining for richer veins within.
wrappers, they look like three body-bags strung up over the county highway. Tonight I wish they were switched on: I'm
running late and I can't stand getting to a movie after it's started. Traffic lights become lower priority in a world in which
gas stations burn for almost the entire month of June. I've got about thirty-five minutes and the theater is only ten
minutes away, but traffic isn't exactly predictable these days. Plus I've got to give Deb, my girlfriend, plenty of time to
shamble from her house to my car.
I note with some interest, sitting at the end of my road and waiting for a small convoy of military vehicles to go by, that
someone appears to have moved into the destroyed gas station. It looks like a couple has set up a makeshift shelter in
the ruined car bay. It's hard to tell between amphibious vehicles and Humvees roaring past, but it looks like the woman
is actually pregnant. I already know that Deb will tell me to take this as a good sign, that things are getting better, so I
won't bother telling her. The whole thing is a travesty of the Advent: a hydraulic lift for a manger, a melted red Texaco
sign standing in for the North Star and a monster Mary and monster Joseph completing the joke. The women's abdomen
is probably just distended. Corpses can't make babies.
I chose the word shamble on purpose. It wasn't a slip or poor usage or, worse, a poetic turn; it's the perfect description
of what Deb does when she goes anywhere: she shambles. When she walks, both her legs drag along the ground and make
a creepy sound that is a combination of dragging and thumping. My girlfriend—I’m saying this directly because my
therapist says it's good to be as direct as possible—is a zombie.
Once the convoy passes, the roads are pretty clear tonight. Usually, I can count on some kind of wreck blocking the
way, or maybe just a jam because somebody's wandered mindlessly out into the middle of the road. All I see tonight is a
truck on its side in a parking lot and what looks like some looting going on at the old Radio Shack, but, thanks to the
convoy, nothing that slows me down. It seems like I've seen so many things in the past six months that I would have
once considered horrifying or sickening. It's amazing how quickly life adjusts to change.
Pretty much the only thing that scares me these days is the cemetery. The irony is not lost on me. Now that the dead
walk the earth and are part of all of our lives again, graveyards have lost most of their mystery for the living, and yet I'll
take the long way around town to avoid it at all costs.
Whenever I get going about how things are really breaking down, society-wise, that things are getting worse, Deb always
reminds me to watch my preconceived notions-bigotry, she calls it, instilled in all of us from years and years of
propaganda against the living dead.
When I get to her place she's already in the front yard, staring at nothing and scaring all the kids on the block. Her skin is
gray and her hair looks like strands of seaweed draped over her skull. I roll down my window:
"Deb? What are you doing?"
"Ugh," she says, and I can tell this is going to be one of those nights.
"What?" I leave the car running and come around to guide her to the passenger door.
"Mnnnnh!"
"Deb? Please don't tell me your vocal cords are gone."
I bend her at the waist and guide her into the car. Even with the seat pushed all the way back, it's a little hard to get her
legs in, but I'm afraid to bend them because they might snap off. I saw that happen to an old lady at work a couple of
weeks ago. She tried sitting in one of the waiting chairs and snap! There she was in two, her legs doing scissor kicks on
the linoleum and her upper torso vertical in the plastic seat, screaming that she was going to sue the government.
I close the door for Deb and then run around the back of the car to my side. I see Deb's parents in the window looking
through the blinds, but when I wave they close them quickly. They're in total denial about Deb's condition. It's a phase,
they tell her and they can't stand me because they think that I had something to do with her becoming a zombie. ("She
was already dead when I met her!" I always say.)
“I was this close, this close, to getting the Hendersons' cat."
Deb holds up a stiff hand as if to show me a small distance between her thumb and forefinger, but she lost that kind of
dexterity in her hand a long time ago. It's okay, though. I know what she means.
"Don't you think the Hendersons would mind you eating their cat?"
She turns to look at me, which means twisting her whole stiff upper torso, "Do you think I care what those drunks think?
They're off on one of their booze cruises without even leaving a bowl of food out for the poor thing. It's so neglected
that it's practically feral. It'd be better off dead. A mercy killing, if you ask me."
I know better than to get into the sticky ethics of animal rights versus zombie rights, so I'm actually glad to see a traffic
jam on the arterial. I let it derail our conversation.
"What now?" I say. "We won't make the movie at this rate."
"Looks like a demonstration."
Sure enough, as we get closer, I see a burning car and what looks like a leg in the middle of the road. There are a couple
of dozen zombies standing around, some right in the middle of the road. One of them has blood all over her chin and
down the front of her dress.
Deb scans the crowd to see if there's anyone she knows as we slowly make it into the one lane left open. I consider
making a remark about rubbernecking but then rethink it, since Deb's neck isn't exactly flexible. Besides, she's become
very sensitive to the language I use.
There are even more zombies around the next intersection. They've filled up all of Chestnut Street.
"Looks like things got out of hand," I say. "There must have been some kind of attack."
"It's a demonstration."
"That's a mob, Deb. I wouldn't want to be out there in the middle of it."
"It's a demonstration," she repeated. "They're protesting."
How can two people sit next to each other and see two completely different things? Deb sees activism and I see, well, a
scene from a horror movie.
"Are your teeth chattering?" Deb says, as a zombie we're rolling past growls in my window.
"No, I'm just a bit cold."
"It's August," she reminds me.
You would think that being in a relationship with a zombie would be a rather
frosty experience, a bit cold, but I can attest that this isn't the case at all. In fact, I do think the issue of emotional
distance is one of our biggest problems, but the problem is all mine. When I look into Deb's dull, gray eyes, I can feel this
incredible pull from her. She wants me not just today, but for the Long Haul. She can sit and just talk and talk and talk,
for days at a time if she wanted, about our feelings for each other. And though I think I'm a pretty agreeable sort-clearly
I'm not too hung up or I'd have more of a problem dating Deb in her current state-hyper-analyzing every moment makes
me even more uncomfortable than cruising through a mob of zombies.
"There's Jerry!" she says, pointing to a zombie trying to open back door of
a school bus.
There's something else bothering me tonight, but I'm not even sure I want to
bring it up. Part of it has to do with the way that Deb has opened my eyes
and changed my way of looking at the world and part of it has to do with
zombies turning out to be real in general. More and more, lately, my mind
keeps going back to Cynthia, my wife. We met in college and got married the summer after we graduated. At first things
were perfect: with a little help
from her parents, we bought a house—the one I still live in—and we got jobs, cars, the whole deal. We talked about
having kids when we saved a little more money and we were happy for a while. But then I don't know what happened, it
was like the life just fell out of the relationship. (At this point, I can just hear Deb yelling at me to watch my biased
language. "The life being sucked out of something is not necessarily a bad thing," quoteth she.) Anyway, Cynthia and I
started fighting a lot about everything, fighting without a point over petty stuff. At other times, we barely talked. We'd
eat in front of the TV and watch our shows and then go to bed and that was about it. We forgot about having kids
completely until the day Cynthia announced that she was late. The home tests didn't come up positive, to our mutual
relief, I guess, but after another month Cynthia went to the doctor.
She wasn't pregnant, but they did find something in her: cancer throughout her uterus and ovaries and, worst of all,
spotting on her liver. Cynthia, who was rarely ill, rarely even unwell, was suddenly given six months to live.
After that, it was surgery or chemo, nearly every day. And once they started digging around in her, she was never the
same. I was very practical back then: I didn't believe in anything without absolute proof. Since I never really saw the
cancer, or any signs that Cyn was sick at all before that, I became convinced that it was the doctors that were killing her.
Of course, I understood intellectually that there was something serious and terrible happening to my wife's cells, but in
terms of really believing it, you might as well as tell me that within a few years the dead would walk the earth.
You see, I guess, how times can change a person.
The doctors may not have been lying about the cancer, but they got at least one thing wrong: Cyn died within three
months of getting the news. She was so weak and blitzed on painkillers that she didn't really know what was happening,
so we never really got to resolve anything before she went. For all I know, she died hating me for letting her down.
I mean, there technically wasn't anything wrong between us, but we both knew that something was missing before she
got sick and the thing that keeps me up at night, the thing that's worse than any of the horrors that I witness on a daily
basis these days, was whatever was missing my fault.
A lot of zombie movies are social commentaries of one kind or another-the
country's problems with race, the country's problem with consumerism, the
country's problem's with zombies, etc. I just never expected that zombies
themselves would be such big social commentators.
Every zombie I know has got an opinion. They're very cerebral. I don't think
a lot of people realize that. I think it has something to do with their bodies shutting down. That's why in all those movies
you have to shoot them in the brain. They think too much. After they've made the switch, they don't have a lot to worry
about: eating the fresh and warm flesh of the living and deliberating on what society needs to do to be better. That's it.
The movie we see tonight? A zombie flick. It wasn't my choice. Sometimes I
just want get away from the topic for a while, but Deb wants everything out
on the table at all times. Just like my therapist, who also happens to be a
zombie. I think she enjoys critiquing the inaccuracies on the screen. On the
way home I suggest that we try seeing a normal movie next time, a romantic
comedy or something.
"Define normal." Deb gives me a cold stare.
"You know what I mean."
"Yes, I think I do."
I try to explain. "Look, I'm just saying, if you know you're going to be offended, then why do we go to these things?"
"I don't really have a choice do I? Do you know any movies actually made by my people yet? It's always the living's
representation of the dead."
"I don't know. Romero had some sympathetic moments for zombies."
"Romero? Ha! He's the worst. He's like D.W. Griffith to my kind and Night of the Living Dead is Birth of a Nation."
I tell her that I think she's really exaggerating, but I think she's really got a point there.
"We're not idiots, you know," she says, attempting to roll her eyes. "The media loves to portray us as mindless, but did
you ever stop to think about how biased the mainstream media itself is?"
"Against the living dead?"
"Not just us. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, whatever."
“Oh, so now there are werewolves?"
So here's that thing that's really bothering me: If Deb is still up and around though still technically dead, what about
Cynthia? I mean, I buried Cyn, or what was left of her after the chemo, a short time before the first zombies showed up-
or went public, as Deb claims, so where does that leave Cyn?
Sometimes I lie in bed and think about her grave, really think about it and I think about Cyn six feet below the azalea
bush I planted for her and I can imagine her scratching at the lid of her overpriced coffin. I think about the weight she
lost in the harrowing last weeks of her life and I think of that terrible wig they buried her in. But mostly I just think about
the sound of her nails once they've scratched through the satin lining of her coffin.
***
Today isn't a good day at work. Truthfully, there hasn't been a good day at work since people started coming back.
Counseling at the Social Security Administration has never been a walk in the park, but now our entire system is
wrecked. It's the little things that people never thought of in those old zombie movies, like the fact that people would be
coming back from the grave not only looking for flesh; they're looking for handouts as well. The undead are very
dependent on public assistance. Deb claims that they're all collectivists, but I think they're generally the biggest bunch
of freeloaders I've ever met. Not one of them contributes to society or pays taxes and yet I have to deal every day with a
line of rotting, angry ghouls who are outraged that their social security number has been retired or even reused.
And we're not the only ones. The police are backlogged for months, processing reports from the undead on their own
murders. The courts are clogged with civil suits trying to deal with the still-unsolved problem of zombies trying to
declare their executed wills null and retrieving their estates. (When I suggest to Deb that that doesn't sound very
collectivist,
she tells me those are a vocal minority. ‘Just cause you're dead doesn't
make you stop being an asshole,’ she says.) Even churches are overflowing, a phenomenon I've never understood. You'd
think having moldered in the ground for some time without passing on to another realm would shake the foundation of
one's beliefs, but old habits die hard. (Says Deb: ‘Nothing dies, and did you ever think that Jesus, raised from the grave,
might have been some kind of zombie? Did you?’)
Just about the only profession not inundated of late, for obvious reasons, is medicine. Fatalities are a thing of the past
nowadays, or at least fatalities as we once knew them.
The result of all of this? That, much of the time, even the most bone-chilling things quickly become reduced to the
mundane. Every day is a reminder that what might be a crisis just might be another boring change.
All of which is by way of saying that things with Deb aren't going well, at all. After the movie, we did what we usually do:
we parked the car outside her parents' house and talked. The lights are off in the house, but I know her parents are
awake in there, watching us fearfully from the darkened windows.
Deb tried to start the conversation again, the one in which she attempts to convince me to convert, to switch over to the
zombie side.
"What, exactly, are you so scared of?"
"I'm not sure," I said.
"Are you afraid it will hurt?"
"Yes, sort of."
***
We drink beer on Cynthia's grave all afternoon, lining the empties neatly next to the azalea bush. The August sun dips
down beneath the trees and those clouds delivered on their threat. It starts to rain in big, warm drops that explode when
they hit the ground. Soon it's pouring, but at least the heat is finally gone.
I pick up the shovel to start the hard work of exhumation.
"Ready?" I say.
"Ready," says Deb with a gray smile standing behind me with a cold embrace.
As the shovel breaks ground on Cynthia's grave, I feel Deb's teeth break the skin on my neck, each of us, in our way,
mining for richer veins within.