by Tony Burgess
Julie approaches the teenage zombie again. This time quickly, relying on his confusion to give her an opportunity. She strides directly up to him and whacks the blade of the hatchet through his forehead, burying it in his zombie brain. She releases the hatchet and lets the boy fall. He lies still at her feet, the weapon hanging off his head like a festive hat. Julie pushes down on his cranium with her foot, and with a yank that squawks the bone she removes the hatchet.
By the time the sun sets on their garden the children are safely indoors. They take turns bathing in the large sink, towelling each other’s little body with soft, careful bats. They slip into the light summer dresses that they have pulled carefully over the heads of dead women and scrubbed clean. Jimmy wears a short violet frock with wide straps and a tiny white pocket. Julie wears a long, black cotton dress to bed. She lies on her back while her brother traces the outline of a stranger’s hand on her belly. There is, in fact, a hand inside her, cooked and crumbling. He smiles at her. She is his one and only.
She closes her eyes and feels the stranger’s hand turn over in digestive juices, fingering the tight aperture at the base of her stomach.
Through a window near the ceiling, Jimmy can see the starry sky and milky light of nightfall. He lifts his hand off Julie’s belly and slips two fingers through the strap that’s fallen down his arm and draws it up his smooth shoulder. He drops his hands on his knees and sits crouched beside his sister on the bed. He watches and listens. Quiet. A rope groans in the dark. Silence. A moth lands. A grey owl rotates its head toward the moon reflected in the window. The room is so quiet that Jimmy can hear the floor lying still in the dark. A wolf howls, across the river and far up the hill. Jimmy listens. The room swings once, turning wildly in the pitch black, and catches itself high in the bones of the small boy’s ear.
21
DAMN WINTER
The only thing as universal as the experience of power is the experience of hunger. The empty stomach, like an orange lantern, casts light off its panels onto the dripping walls of a cave. Illuminated there are directions, instructions and recipes, carved and smudged in the stone, potato and potato habitat. The empty stomach turns its fierce light and obscure chemicals into a camera, developing maps in its juices, even going as far as to slip a photograph into the artist’s hand. At the cave entrance the painter stands, rubbing his or her tummy with the map, saying, “Hey, I know where that is.”
When Greg arches his back, his Higher Power shimmies the man’s body up tighter between the fork of his legs and squeezes tightly to secure the gain. The HP stifles the liquid in Greg’s throat with a hand cupped over his mouth. Greg’s body relaxes and the HP presses his lips in the soft hollow of his neck. Greg feels the warmth of the lips and they stimulate a sizzle of digestive juices at the bottom of his heart. The two men lie this way, like a long caduceus, on the driveway, writhing occasionally to feel more directly the consolation of each other’s body.
Greg tries to open his eyes but finds a lid pinned shut by a thumb. With his one eye, a tall blue cone that skates across a giant white planet, he observes the trees and sky above him, eager to see changes, signs of encouragement. A birch tree flies upward to his left. Its white trunk is scored with lesions where the wet rubble of its interior has burst through. Its trunk blackens further up and branches straighten into slick spears. At this height, the furthest that Greg can focus, bright green lights wrap the air around the deadly tree. Beyond, the leaves checker the sky, filling in the squares in a grid, sharing their presence evenly with ice blue. Greg can see in each distant screen, clear and livid with detail, little blue manic dramas. A blue policeman falls off a cliff, a child wiping his nose, a woman in a chair, a wrestler snaps his shoulder straps, a picture of Jesus so cold he freezes, a pimple squeezes, hair is teased, a sneeze is sneezed, a breeze leaves, the easy … eases … keezes … cheezes … breezes …
The HP lifts his lips away from Greg’s neck and breathes through his mouth. The hot breath chills a patch of saliva and makes Greg shiver. He feels the breath like steam tickling the short hairs at the base of his neck. The HP slips a finger into Greg’s mouth and the taste of salt fills it with saliva. Greg sucks the finger hard, flicking his tongue on the crease that marks the first digit. He probes the crease until he raises taste buds across the finger pad. He tries to turn his body, to find something more, but the HP tightens his grip. In this small struggle Greg feels his cock suddenly pump against his jeans, filling his crotch with hot fluid. The pleasure spreads down his legs and past him. Greg opens his mouth and pants quick breaths around the finger, cooling it so that when he closes his mouth the finger is icy.
There are seven valves articulating Greg’s digestive system and they throb and spit along the empty string that connects them. He is starving to death. But mostly he is dehydrating. The skin on his body sits up stiffly where the HP has held it. There is too much friction against the drying fibres of muscle for the skin to slide back into place. Systems of thin, grey wrinkles show where Greg’s Higher Power has tugged and prodded him, instilling peace and courage against the coming death: body insulating body.
Greg’s vision has become strange to him, the mucous membranes have retreated into dry puckers, pulling his eyeballs back deep into their sockets. The act of focusing is becoming impaired by pain and what he cannot see with his eyes is compensated for by the drying pelt of his brain. The scenes of his addiction are being played out by leather dolls in a six-inch by six-inch shooting gallery. He turns a doll over and inspects a seam. His own hair, now stiff blond, bristles out between the stitches. He replaces the doll and shrugs, “I’m dying. It’s so odd. I’m so strange.”
Time is passing quickly, frosting its boots in the night. In the morning an icy dew stings its cracked lips. At a height of four hundred feet, three turkey vultures hang off an immense updraft and float downward in a wide circle.
Over the next few days the two men lie in the gravel and weeds. They hold each other, and occasionally one of them has episodes of anguish that cause him to twist in the arms of the other. The episodes subside under the soothing hands and calm whispers of the Higher Power.
In time Greg does die. His Higher Power kneels at his side and crosses the teenager’s arms, lifting the hair from his young, pale face. He stands and looks down at the body that is ruined and vacant and he mouths a short prayer. He walks away from the body without looking back and climbs, in clothes now filthy and tattered, toward the highway. At the side of the road he puts out his thumb. He expects a chariot to descend from a cloud to pick him up. He’s surprised when an old red pick-up truck turns the corner and comes to a dusty stop on the shoulder just ahead of him.
22
WINTER
It isn’t possible to grow tired of a stream. A stream is a permanently exciting medium. Stones jiggle in its bed and roots laugh at its edges. The sun shoots Popsicles at a stream. The clouds lay soft, damp towels on its banks. And animals return from the stream shivering with a hundred rainbows weaving in their wet fur.
And the fish.
The fish are different. The fish are always different.
In this stream the fish were introduced as minnows through the mouths of metal tubes that dipped below the surface. As adults they return to the precise place of their birth to spawn. They battle like charioteers through the cold water, peeling back their pretty bodies, grimacing with the effort so that their faces look like bullets. And when they arrive home they impale themselves on the sharp metal tips of pipes. By the hundreds they drive their bodies straight onto these stakes, packing the hollow with the bruised flesh of their throats and the frozen bridges of their noses. Throughout the summer aggressive water beetles curve over the openings in military anger. They extract the fibres of meat with barbed toes, feeding it up into their little nightmare faces. The following spring a glistening black chain mail lines the stream, darkening the bottom, where exhausted trout climb along, blind and
proud.
By the fall Julie’s belly has begun to bell outward and Jimmy’s body is springing in frog-like leaps over one pubic hurdle after another. By November his hand is huge and he splays it over Julie’s swollen abdomen, marvelling at its strength.
After five weeks the embryo looks like an ear, or a deflated crab claw, or an oyster. The world presses its face against the meat of the uterine wall, blinking its eyes, surprised that the embryo is in the process of looking like anything at all. This cognitive reality, that it always appears as something else, will dog the little omelette all its life.
At a party in the suburbs a teenage boy lifts his lips from a flaming bong, and when the smoke clears he pulls back a blond bang from his eyes and says: “The stages of a fetus are exactly the same as the stages of evolution. First it’s, like, a single cell, right? Like an amoeba. Then it’s a fish, then an amphibian. Then it, like, crawls up onto the land and grows little prehistoric kangaroo legs. And then its tail disappears and it’s like a tiny monkey.” He seals off the glass pipe again and draws in loudly through bubbling water. The girl is amazed by this.
During the fifth month the fetus is listening. It shudders happily in an enclosed world fed by maternal blood. In Julie’s case the maternal blood has a high concentration of protein. From human flesh: the chewy muscles of zombies that she has ambushed near her front door.
The boy exhales a dripping cloud of smoke across the girl’s chest: “No way, man, if, like, a brother and sister conceive a baby, then it’s usually weak and can’t fight off childhood diseases and, it’s like the worst for the species. So it’s, uh, like part of our genetic make-up that we don’t have sex with our siblings.” The girl reaches for the bong. “Yeah, not without a condom anyway.”
Jimmy lifts a pelvic bone to his face and lines up his eyes in the hollow scoops that form a natural mask. Two wide blades of dry bone curve over his head like a tall decorative helmet. He wiggles his tongue lewdly and crosses his eyes. Julie laughs and flicks wet raspberry from the rim of a bowl in her lap onto her brother. He slaps the berry as it strikes his chest and he squeezes the juice through his fingers. He gives out a birdlike cry of anguish. She admires his handsome face as he pretends to die, still holding the tall mask to his closed eyes.
While the girl sucks deeply, filling the glass tube with thick white smoke, the boy pushes down on his crotch with the heel of his hand: “And it’s also bad to eat people. Because, well, you know, aside from being sick and everything, it weakens us if we do it, ’cause it crushes the immune system. And anyway, it’s genetic that we don’t, ’cause if we could we would’ve long ago when we were starving through the winter. And the only survivor would be some fat pig, and we would have died off that first year!” The girl feels a light-headed swirl of connection leading her to some conclusion or other.
After the first snowfall the pregnant couple stay inside most of the time. They conserve their energy and focus on the coming of their child. This is also the beginning of a season-long food shortage. Besides a scarcity of fruits and vegetables, fewer zombies come wandering near their home. So they mete out carefully the food that they do have, carefully rationing out the zombie flesh.
As his sister becomes less mobile Jimmy begins to forage out in the newly fallen snow for easily visible and trackable wildlife. An abundance of rabbits criss-cross their property, and Jimmy spends hours falling in the snow behind them, throwing rocks at them, and spraining his ankles in their doorways. He returns late in the morning to Julie, empty handed and surly. As the weeks progress and they begin to hate the sight of each other, Jimmy pretends he’s going hunting and sits out of view at the picnic table, shivering in the cold just to keep away from his sister’s icy glare. Julie sits at the stove, wearing a zombie’s trenchcoat, craving another human being, anyone who speaks, who isn’t mute and stupid.
They survive the winter this way, occasionally patching together an understanding that their mutual hostility is born of their hard life together. On some winter nights, in the deep silence of the deep snow that surrounds them, they hold each other and accept each other with hands that stroke kindly, remembering. The spring will bring them back. The spring will bring new life.
And it does. With the first thaw Jimmy manages to kill his first rabbit. He stands in the doorway swinging it proudly by the ears as Julie applauds with her tired arms. He reaches for a knife above the bench to skin their dinner. Julie feels a strange clench yank at her body from below.
Every version of the birth of a child is always lacking something. Neither a satisfactory miracle nor a base torment, childbirth is only one of the thousands of aggressive events that never actually occur in people’s lives. It is enough of something, however, to put everyone on alert. And Julie and Jimmy are no exception.
Julie is sitting on the zombie trenchcoat that stretches open across the floor. As the coat soaks up the fluid that has crashed out from between her legs, Jimmy frantically lights candles along the dirty edge of the freezer. He crouches down at a distance in front of her and, having no instruction as to any role he might play in the birth, he assumes a position natural to the expectation that an object under pressure will need to be caught, maybe in mid-flight. Julie is receiving more primal instruction, and she follows each muscular cue with a howling face.
The top of the baby’s head appears and Jimmy falls backward off his haunches. The baby flies to the floor, as if shot from a gun. She lies still in a broken case of transparent veins. Jimmy sits up, looks over his sister’s body, looking for her face, but her head is thrown back and turned toward the wall.
Suddenly the baby springs to its feet and runs toward Jimmy. She turns on her umbilical cord and slams her back into his chest. Julie looks up in horror to see her baby daughter facing her. The baby snatches the cable in her tiny hand and twists it into her mouth. With tough gums on soft flesh, she clamps down, crunching the cells. Jimmy jerks back from his daughter. She runs toward the door and with a tug on the cord she snaps her mother’s hips off the ground, breaking the bond. In the doorway she makes a threatening star shape with her arms and legs, and darts her eyes back and forth from parent to parent. She screams — “Fuck you!” — emptying the contents of her lungs down her front before disappearing.
Julie and Jimmy remain on the floor, their eyes uncomprehending and their mouths flung open. Julie attempts to rise first, but she can only slide onto her knees before falling over. She waves frantically at Jimmy, who stands, trying to overcome his fear of his daughter. He is terrified of her. He is scared for his life. Julie falls toward him and swipes at his hip, sending him running to the door.
Outside the shack a pile of wood is stacked waist high on one side of the door; on the other there is a cage of ribs. Jimmy turns the corner. Sitting at the picnic table are the three complete skeletons that he assembled for company. Now that spring has thawed away their snow-sculpted features Jimmy no longer recognizes them and jumps back. He runs in the other direction, looking for a daughter who has run away from home. He takes off in a circle around the shack, frightening a large raven that claps at him before swooping over to the picnic table, where it attempts to land on a fragile black collar bone. The raven crashes through wet ribs, clattering the brittle cage off the table and into the melting snow, releasing a sweet gas through the air. Jimmy clutches the front of his mouth and gags. His sister appears, leaning on a stick and trailing a long red rope on the ground behind her.
About one hundred metres south of where they stand staring at each other are two men in hunting caps. They’re crouched down in a path that leads up to a picnic area from deep in the woods.
“What the hell was that? What the Jesus was that?”
The larger hunter looks out from under a red flannel visor. He swallows and winces for his partner to be quiet. He whispers.
“Mother of God! I don’t know. Some kind of little freak baby! Some kind of little fuckin’ zombie spawn. I
swear to fuckin’ God!”
His partner shivers and, with a hand resting on his friend’s shoulder, whispers into his ear.
“Are you telling me that those zombie bastards are breeding? Out here?”
The large man draws a rifle off his thighs and brings it up his side.
“Oh yes, that’s exactly what I’m sayin’. They’re hidin’ out up here making a race of killer fuckin’ rat babies.”
The smaller man tosses his breached weapon closed with a fitted clunk.
“That thing was doin’ ninety up the path for crissakes. What the hell? Are they super-zombies or what?”
“If that little SOB ever grows up. Jesus. I think we got a goddamn Sasquatch situation here.”
“Shhh. There’s something up ahead. Get ready.”
The larger hunter rises to stand and brings the rifle up to his shoulder. He squints down the sight, pointing the gun at the direction from where he can hear something coming towards them. A head and shoulders appear to the left of the path ahead and he squeezes the trigger.
The figure is struck in the chest. It falls backward, collapsing in the bush. The two men move forward and discover the body flat on its back, already dead. They continue toward the clearing and when the raven lifts off the table with a vertebra stuck in its talon the smaller man erases it from the air with a shotgun blast. Before the flurry of black feathers falls to the ground he fires his cannon again, this time hurtling a young girl’s body back into the walls of a shack.