I, Zombie

He moved away from her, numb and disgusted with himself. Her chest stood open. Blood dripped from Michael’s face, and contented grunts came from somewhere. Before him, his mother’s belly was a gory pit, her ribs like pink fingers, like two open hands cradling nothing. Michael imagined crawling inside those glistening palms. He felt himself shrinking down, time zipping backwards, until he could fit inside her belly, could pull the flaps of loose skin over him like a blanket and return to the womb in which he had gestated. Maybe he could be born again, not like those assholes at NA but really born again. He wouldn’t be a monster this time. He’d be someone who takes care of his mother. Someone who takes better care of himself.

A scent from the streets wafted in and filled the decrepit apartment, nicotine-stained curtains flapping in the breeze. Michael turned, his nose following the smell of the living, his guts full of his mother’s guts but already thinking of the next fix. One more bite, like that bee sinking its stinger into his arm, filling him with its nectar.

He stood and staggered toward the window. He craved a cigarette. Michael always craved a smoke after a meal. A clay pot on the sill used to hold flowers when his sister was still coming around, before she’d given up on the two of them. Now it was mounded with crushed butts, filters stained muddy brown with tar, trails of ash everywhere.

Knocking over the pot, he clumsily groped through the open window and fell head-first onto the landing. His shoulder slammed painfully into the steel grating, and his overfull belly sloshed sickeningly. Michael could taste the bile and blood come partway up his throat before sinking back down. Almost reflexively, he righted himself, arms waving for balance, grunts and groans that were not his leaking past bloody lips.

Here was Michael’s sanctuary, high above the streets. Here was where he sat between soaring highs, filling himself with deep inhalations of smoke to choke down the numb lows. Here was where he suffered the broad and empty valleys between his life’s feeble peaks, so few in number.

Years suddenly felt like mere days. The past had piled up without him noticing. Maybe it was from living the same day over and over: cashing government checks, never enough to properly care for her, way more than was needed to improperly care for her, making deals with the leftovers, getting high, drifting off through the roof and into the clouds while his mom sat quietly in the next room.

Years and years that felt like days. It was all the same day. The same craving every moment, the itching urge, the temporary relief, the guilt and self-loathing, burning cigarettes down to the butt on the fire escape, peering through the glass where the flashing cherry lit up his reflection, his mother in the room beyond, locked in her chair, her back turned, forced to stare glassy-eyed at an empty corner of the room rather than out the window she loved, because Michael couldn’t take being seen by her some days, the days when he feared she was still in there, when he suspected the doctors knew what the fuck they were talking about.

He caught a final glimpse of what was left of his mother before lurching down the steep stairs, falling as much as walking, tumbling one flight at a time toward the pavement far below. A car alarm wailed in the distance. Some undead and directionless thing like himself had likely staggered into it, not watching where it was going.

Michael wondered how that was possible, for any of them not to see where they were going. He spiraled down the old fire escape, metal clanging, bouncing off the rails that guided him in one direction only: around and around.

Circles. As tidy and looping as the days were short. How could any of them not see where they were going? They’d been going around and around in tiny circles, had been for years, years that sat heavy in the gut of the living. And this was what made stomachs turn: the weight of all that time wasted. It was the seconds and minutes and hours, the true nectar of life, gorged on hungrily and thoughtlessly, forever indigestible, everyone hungry for more.

8 • Gloria

The wildlife was oblivious to all but the spoils. The human world was dead, but Gloria saw that theirs was still gloriously alive. The pigeons had multiplied. They gathered in noisy flocks and fully claimed a city long held on lease. Swooping in thunderous packs, wings like the sound of flags flapping in a breeze, they followed the bounty of trash that drifted everywhere. They picked at the scattered bones bleaching in the October sun. They stirred reluctantly when the dead intruded and hopped around on fragile legs, picking at the scraps. They exploded upward in fear only of the dogs.