The Living Dead

And if you let yourself die, then within minutes what's left of you will wake up hungry too, with only one fact still burning in its poor rotting skull: that Suzie's faking.

Zora And The Zombie

by Andy Duncan

Andy Duncan's fiction has appeared in magazines such as Asimov's Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Conjunctions, Weird Tales, and SCI FICTION, and in anthologies such as Starlight 1, Eclipse One, Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Wizards. Much of his short fiction has been collected in Beluthahatchie and Other Stories, which won the World Fantasy Award. Duncan won the World Fantasy Award, again, for his story "The Pottawatomie Giant" and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for "The Chief Designer." He also co-edited (with F. Brett Cox) the anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic. When not writing, Duncan teaches in the Honors College of the University of Alabama and works as a senior editor at a business-to-business magazine.

This story was a finalist for both the Stoker and Nebula awards. It was also reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and in that volume, Duncan is quoted as saying that he'd been inspired by the work of Zora Neale Hurston for years, but that this story was the first time he'd attempted to write about her. "I marvel that many readers, judging from their comments, never heard of Hurston," he says. "Had I realized beforehand that this story would be many readers' introduction to her I wouldn't have dared write it."

"What is the truth?" the houngan shouted over the drums. The mambo, in response, flung open her white dress. She was naked beneath. The drummers quickened their tempo as the mambo danced among the columns in a frenzy. Her loose clothing could not keep pace with her kicks, swings and swivels. Her belt, shawl, kerchief, dress floated free. The mambo flung herself writhing onto the ground. The first man in line shuffled forward on his knees to kiss the truth that glistened between the mambo's thighs.

Zora's pencil point snapped. Ah, shit. Sweat-damp and jostled on all sides by the crowd, she fumbled for her penknife and burned with futility. Zora had learned just that morning that the Broadway hoofer and self-proclaimed anthropologist Katherine Dunham, on her Rosenwald fellowship to Haiti—the one that rightfully should have been Zora's—not only witnessed this very truth ceremony a year ago, for good measure underwent the three-day initiation to become Mama Katherine, bride of the serpent god Damballa—the heifer!

* * *

Three nights later, another houngan knelt at another altar with a platter full of chicken. People in the back began to scream. A man with a terrible face flung himself through the crowd, careened against people, spread chaos. His eyes rolled. The tongue between his teeth drooled blood. "He is mounted!" the people cried. "A loa has made him his horse." The houngan began to turn. The horse crashed into him. The houngan and the horse fell together, limbs entwined. The chicken was mashed into the dirt. The people moaned and sobbed. Zora sighed. She had read this in Herskovitz, and in Johnson too. Still, maybe poor fictional Tea Cake, rabid, would act like this. In the pandemonium she silently leafed to the novel section of her notebook. "Somethin' got after me in mah sleep, Janie," she had written. "Tried tuh choke me tuh death."

Another night, another compound, another pencil. The dead man sat up, head nodding forward, jaw slack, eyes bulging. Women and men shrieked. The dead man lay back down and was still. The mambo pulled the blanket back over him, tucked it in. Perhaps tomorrow, Zora thought, I will go to Pont Beudet, or to Ville Bonheur. Perhaps something new is happening there.

"Miss Hurston," a woman whispered, her heavy necklace clanking into Zora's shoulder. "Miss Hurston. Have they shared with you what was found a month ago? Walking by daylight in the Ennery road?"