The Living Dead

I guess you never look at the buttons on a shirt, even if you button them a thousand times. The buttons on my white shirt were gunmetal grey, with veins of teal. Quite unique. They weren't as bright and new as my corpse's button, because they'd taken a few turns in the dryer.

Gently I lifted her hand and turned it over, ran my finger over her tiny palm, over the pads of her baby fingers. Rough. Not the fingers of a child who spent much time playing hopscotch.

"Is everyone all right?" Maggie, from down at the end of the hall, stood in my doorway. Behind her two more of my colleagues craned their necks, trying to see what was happening. There was rarely excitement in our department; maybe an irate student once in a while, but never shattered glass or exploding computer monitors.

"Everything's fine," Jack said. He was a good guy, I realized. I was still down on my knees, staring at the button, my eyes red and tear-stained. The crowd dispersed, trailed by two corpses.

Jack squatted, put his arm around my shoulder. "You okay now?"

I nodded.

"I'm not gonna say I understand how you feel, but it must be awful."

I nodded.

"If you ever want to talk, just knock."

I nodded a third time. He patted my back and left.

It was nearly time for my one o'clock class. I kept a sweater in the bottom drawer of my desk for days when the a/c was cranked too high. I pulled the sweater over the ruined shirt, and, as my head popped through, I thought I caught my corpse glancing down at the button lying at her feet.

I stooped and retrieved the button, slipped it into her pocket, next to the other, shinier one.

I went around the corner to the bathroom, held the door open for my corpse when it started to swing shut on her. I washed my face and combed my hair, her watchful eyes reflected in the mirror.

I yanked a couple of paper towels from the dispenser, wet them under the faucet, knelt and wiped the worst of the dirt from my corpse's chubby cheeks and forehead. I tried to comb some of the debris out of her hair, but it was hopelessly tangled. I shoved the comb into my back pocket and plucked the biggest chips out by hand. I glanced at my watch. Time for class.

After retrieving a stack of syllabi and the class roll from my office I headed into the airy central lobby, up the double flight of stairs, steadying myself with the silver metal handrail. Halfway up I turned and looked back. My corpse was struggling up the second step, her legs too small, and too stiff, to make the climb easily. I went back down, wrapped my arms around my corpse, and carried her up the stairs.

The Song The Zombie Sang

by Harlan Ellison^® and Robert Silverberg

Between them, Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg have won pretty much every award the science fiction and fantasy field has to offer; heck, individually they've each won pretty much every award the field has to offer. Both have been named Grand Masters by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (the organization's life-time achievement award), and between them they have 12 Hugos, 8 Nebulas, and 27 Locus awards, among a slew of other awards. They are, quite simply, living legends. To include a story by either would be an honor; to have one written by both of them is transcendent.

In his collaborative collection, Partners in Wonder, Ellison said that this story was inspired by a writer he encountered while teaching at a college writing workshop. The man was "smashed drunk from morning to night" but still managed to put himself in front of the typewriter every morning to bang out a few words. "It was as though he was a zombie," Ellison said, "that he continued writing only as a reflex, the way a frog's leg jumps when it receives a galvanic shock, that he might as well be dead and stored in a vault except when he had to write."

From the fourth balcony of the Los Angeles Music Center the stage was little more than a brilliant blur of constantly changing chromatics—stabs of bright green, looping whorls of crimson. But Rhoda preferred to sit up there. She had no use for the Golden Horseshoe seats, buoyed on their grab-grav plates, bobbling loosely just beyond the fluted lip of the stage. Down there the sound flew off, flew up and away, carried by the remarkable acoustics of the Center's Takamuri dome. The colors were important, but it was the sound that really mattered, the patterns of resonance bursting from the hundred quivering outputs of the ultracembalo.

And if you sat below, you had the vibrations of the people down there—

She was hardly naive enough to think that the poverty that sent students up to the top was more ennobling than the wealth that permitted access to a Horseshoe; yet even though she had never actually sat through an entire concert down there, she could not deny that music heard from the fourth balcony was purer, more affecting, lasted longer in the memory. Perhaps it was the vibrations of the rich.