I, Zombie

The lights from a helicopter drifted among the stars, faintly blinking. They had grown fewer in recent days. Jennifer had hoped they would become more abundant. She had imagined them bringing supplies back in the time when she’d known hope. She had dreamed of them coming to haul away the living. Someone had said they’d seen this happen the first day or two. But those were private helicopters or ones with television station numbers on the side. The hunter green and black helicopters had soon replaced these, and they now hovered warily and only at a distance. They did nothing. And gone were the days of hope.

Now, when Jennifer saw a helicopter, she didn’t imagine it bringing supplies. She pictured instead a man inside with a long gun trained across her shuffle. Shoot, she would plead to this young soldier. Do it. It comforted her to imagine the warmth of a red dot on the center of her forehead. She would silently scream and wave imagined limbs while she prayed for the bullet—but it never came. The helicopters simply hovered and watched, and Jennifer imagined they had their reasons. Maybe the members of the shuffle were still considered citizens. Hadn’t there been a controversy once? Some woman with a man’s name who had captivated America? A woman mostly gone, obviously not able to do anything but suffer, and yet that’s all they would allow her to do.

Terry, right? What finally happened to her? Jennifer couldn’t remember. The story had gone on too long for her to care.

Maybe it would be the same for her and the shuffle. Maybe the soldiers had orders to observe, nothing more. Maybe the politicians were meeting in chambers somewhere and dithering. Maybe the rest of America was glued to its televisions, watching in amazement, the elderly covering their mouths in shock, the young calling their friends and making jokes, saying how cool this shit was, could you believe it?

The helicopter lights moved against stars impossibly far away. All the lights were far away and out of reach. Jennifer remembered what a boyfriend had once told her about the stars, how they could be long gone but still shining. They could have burned out a thousand years ago, and their light would just now be reaching Earth. Gone and yet still there. Dead and seen at the same time.

Trash rustled in the darkness and stirred against Jennifer’s ankles. There was no one left to come and sweep it away. It flew out from busted windows when the wind gusted. It gathered against the stoops and in the gutters. There was the smell of a fire somewhere, the distant whisper of conspiring flames, and Jennifer wondered what the rest of the world was doing. Were they succumbing to the same disease as her shuffle? Or did they watch, glued to their televisions once again as her city burned, as it all came crumbling down into streets of staggering ruin? Was this nothing more than another story for gaping jaws and wide eyes? Or would the soldiers in those faraway helicopters and the politicians in their chambers find some way to shut it down, to turn it off, to do anything more for her than change the fucking channel—?

7 • Michael Lane

Michael ate his mother until his stomach burst. He could feel it rupture, could feel the organ stretch to bloating as he ate and kept on eating—and then it popped. His insides seemed to rearrange themselves as hastily swallowed mouthfuls of her flesh sagged down inside his own guts. Small bits of sinew and fat remained stuck between his teeth like roast beef.

One craving had been sated. Michael thought again of the little black kit on top of the fridge, the spoon with its heat-warped patina, a plastic orange lighter low on fluid, a needle that had dipped into his arm a thousand times, depositing its nectar like a honeybee, leaving him there on the sofa, head lolling in rapture, his mother drooling on herself in the next room as she filled a clear bag with frothing yellow piss.

From the neck up, she still looked the same. She was just as dead to him, just as eerily alive. Eyes open, she stared at an empty patch of floor. Her jaw was slack, her lips parted, as if she might finally say something, might finally snap out of it and fucking say something.

Michael felt the strain of her flesh inside his belly. The cat and his mother felt heavy in his abdomen, taut from taking in too much. Greedy. Always greedy.