I, Zombie

It had started small, with him forgetting things. And just as the family learned to cope with his blank stares and his groping for the right word, they had to worry about him wandering off. And as they got used to penning him up like a rooster, he started falling, banging his head on furniture, breaking his wrist. The bleeding in his brain from the fall in the driveway didn’t help. Not enough. As bad as that day was for the family, it was only the beginning. Years later, Gloria would look back on those early struggles and wish he’d struck his head harder. She would wish that he didn’t have to live and see what he would eventually become.

This was easier to admit now that she was beyond death herself, now that she was whatever she had turned into, now that she could wish a similar fate on herself. All these discoveries felt much the same, this coping with a new reality that gradually got worse and worse. It was a lot like prison, she imagined. A lot like hospital beds. A lot like life, in many ways. Youthful vigor becomes more rot than wisdom. Hopeful optimism is battered by harsh reality. Health and understanding seem to intersect in one’s forties, the one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you’ll know one day what you should’ve taken the time to appreciate. Maybe it’ll be when your knees start popping, when your hands no longer work like they should. It probably won’t be any sooner.

Gloria began to appreciate all she once had somewhere between 2nd Avenue and 3rd. It was a week ago, during her first feed, while tasting human flesh. Burying her head in some dead man’s abdomen, she’d had this spark of awareness that all the bullshit fears of her former life were nothing. Worries over money, over Carl, her grandmother, over not having kids of her own, never once thinking how amazing it was to breathe and not feel the cool air flowing through one’s cheek and hammering sensitive teeth, never once going outside to walk in whatever direction she chose, just because she could.

There were things she could now admit. Like wanting her grandfather dead because it affected her routine, because it meant guilt-ridden visits to that nasty hospital. She never gave much thought to him being inside there, terrified, dizzy, all alone. Not until somewhere between 2nd Avenue and 3rd when she’d felt it, too. Not until this sudden awakening that here was her eternity, eating those who themselves were starving, shuffling after gaunt survivors as they sprinted terrified through the streets, often alone, hoping to find sanctuary or company, armed with guns or sticks or nothing at all.

This was her life, roaming the city day and night while these startled fish flapped through shallowing streams, while the living ran out of water, while they swam from the sharks and tumbled into nets.

Gloria remembered her first feed, that older man, and how her thoughts back then had also turned to her grandfather. There she was, killing a man, and wishing she wasn’t. Wishing she could stop. The irony struck her there in the middle of that intersection, the years of keeping her grandfather alive, saving him over and over, and wishing she hadn’t.

The shadows of Manhattan stretched across its wide streets. One of Gloria’s shoes was gone; she didn’t remember when or how. It’d probably happened at night. Here was another prison discovery, another thing to learn about life behind bars. It was the fitful, waking sleep. Never quite asleep, though. Always moving. Always standing or crawling. There was no stop to anything anymore. It was hell eternal. It was hospital beds and reruns and fucking remote controls always out of reach—

Gloria’s stomach churned. The sleep wasn’t the worst part. Oh, not even the worst part. That would be the bowel movements. The same had been true of her grandfather. It had come in stages. Innocently enough, at first. A nice man in blue work pants on his knees in the bathroom installing handles by the toilet. He had spoken of his own grandmother. He told Gloria about these new bathtubs with little doors for getting in and out. Made it safer. Said the seals on them leaked sometimes, but it was worth it. Finding a puddle on the tile was better than finding a loved one with a broken hip, right? He said this with a smile, wiping his forehead with his sleeve, tightening that last screw on the handle and insisting Gloria look into them. Gloria had said she would.

Her grandfather barely had time to test that handle. He moved to bedpans and sponges before she or her sister got the chance to look into those bathtubs with their leaky doors. It happened so fast, his downhill slide. It went on forever and seemed to happen so fast. One moment, a stranger is installing a handle by his toilet. The next moment, the strongest and ablest man she had ever known is found sleeping in his own shit.

So fast.