Zombies were everywhere. And not in a good way. Now, you may be questioning how Zombies could invade the world in an acceptable fashion, and to that I will hypocritically warn you not to lie to yourself. I know you’ve thought about the positives of a Zombie apocalypse at least once. Now, in any given situation of such, I would’ve wanted to take the role of badass resistance fighter, but being a badass resistance fighter meant that there was a resistance in the first place. In the cesspool known as high school, resistances were ants stomped on by the boot of social conformity before they would amount to anything near rebellion. That was what I had hoped, at least, that there had been something to squish in the first place. Most days I was left wondering exactly how alone I could claim to be. I knew I felt alone enough for it to hurt. Was I the only one immune? Or was it about self-preservation? About staying you, even when everyone and everything told you that being you meant being something terrible. Zombies were mindless creatures, following one another but having no real direction. The Crows may have deafened my hope, but it was better than being brain-dead. I didn’t want to be like them, pretending that it was okay to accept the boxes we were placed in at birth. There was something grand and melancholy to me about thinking of life so differently than the others did. I walked the halls listening to Zombie groans and never quite understanding them, but hearing them clear as day. It was surprisingly easy to talk to the Undead. They might’ve been the only Monsters to appear outside my mind, but that didn’t mean they were hard to deal with. Raaawwwwggggg might’ve been lost in translation, but I could bullshit my way through it as easily as I did Spanish. The Undead existed without the need to harm me, but it seemed they did it anyway. Being alone was supposed to mean you wouldn’t get hurt, but I learned that being alone might’ve been what hurt the most. The Undead had a strangely coveted version of happiness found in being together. And I guess that’s what I wanted most of all. To be happy.
I woke up one day realizing that not everyone had a beast dwelling inside them. Not everyone woke up with clawing desolation stirring in their stomachs. And not everyone had a somber ballad echoing their footsteps, making music a thing of despair and desolation. That was the thing about the Beast, it was invisible to anyone without the right eyes. We are born blind, and it seems to take too long for most people to realize they haven’t really been seeing at all. Realizations were terribly honest things, my conscience decided. There is a beast dwelling inside me and no one else in the entire world is forced into accepting the same tenancy I am. The Beast invaded my body with no intent on leaving. It is wrecking my mind in its wake. It works in the wee hours of the night, sending bad thoughts to my mind and causing me to curl up into a ball in an effort to stop them. Its claws were sharp as it padded around my aching body, and the bristles of the Beast’s fur tattooed hopelessness into my chest. Yet still I woke up another day realizing that I did not hate the Beast as I should have. The problem I had with it was the fact that I knew it wasn’t a diabolical villain. The Beast might’ve been the worst of them all because it was made up of despair and an instinct that longed to survive. We had too much in common. It was a desperate creature, only wishing to survive, even if that meant feeding off someone as vulnerable to the world as everyone else. I feared that looking in the mirror meant staring at the Beast. I feared that I had become the Beast, that it would be all I ever was. We were fighting a war over my body. One that would not end until one of us dropped down and died. Despite how long I have gone, I worried that one day I would lay down my weapons and hand myself over to the darkness. A battle raging against yourself was worst of all. It meant that no one saw your struggles because they existed only inwardly. There wasn’t any bleeding, so there was no need for a bandage. But not all wounds can be treated that simply, and not all people know that they need to be treated at all. You can’t see depression bleeding, it doesn’t wound the body but the soul instead.
I had a list of Fears. They weren’t Monsters, but they didn’t hesitate to be there whenever the Empty haunted my nights and the Crows became too loud or when the Undead invaded my space and when the Beast became too hard to bear. My Fears were what weaved the Monsters into the same fate. They were the reason I was stuck in the eternal loop of bearing the Monsters.
Admitting to myself people could smile so effortlessly and never understand how I felt.
Falling so deep into a hole that I could never find a way out.
Getting infected by the metaphorical Zombie virus.
Being a useless Homo sapiens in a world moving at a speed I could never catch up to.
Loneliness.
Silence.
Losing my mind.
That was all I would like to share on the matter of Fears. My soul was hardly an open door; even the Monsters waging war could not win against the defenses keeping it closed.
The fact of the matter was that I knew I shouldn’t have been fighting alone, but something kept me grounded to the Monsters. I feared silence more than I feared them. Silence meant thinking too much and thinking too much meant wanting to think nothing at all. I never had a pick, but I always knew that there would be only one to come after me. One Monster over another, but never all at the same time, and I guess that’s what caused my downfall on that day, the element of surprise. It was the Struggle. The moment when the Monsters decided they were tired of waiting in line. I was in the car on the way home from school. It had been a bad couple of weeks. Weeks that were filled by the Undead nearly swallowing me up in the classroom. Weeks where I felt the Beast and the Empty churning in my stomach, where the Crows had cawed incessantly and my Fears ran thick through my blood. The Monsters had given up waiting, they had all come closing in on me at once. Were the Monsters a perpetual presence in my life? It had taken a lot of self-control to keep things together, but sitting in the backseat listening to carpool voices talk about such simple things made me snap. Cruel words slide from the lips easier than apologetic ones do. Retreating home meant that I could escape. Being alone didn’t mean the same as feeling alone, and sitting on the porch swing by myself helped me to breathe a sigh of relief. And then came something I thought would never come.
Hope.
It happened so quickly that I barely caught the shift. There was a peach tree growing on the edge of the fence that separated our house from the neighbor’s. From the convergence a flock of small birds emerged. Something about watching them fly changed me. The sky was a symphony of lilac and tangerine. The scent of summer wafted in the air, despite the season being months away, and there was something serene about the way everything swayed in the warm breeze. I watched the little birds flap their wings as they passed overhead. For a moment, their bodies were left suspended in the air before getting caught under the beat of their wings. It was mesmerizing. The Wild Thoughts, the good thoughts I hadn’t known existed, came rushing toward the Monsters at full force. The Empty was filled with colors made from creativity, infused by music and magic and all things imaginable. The Crows were silenced by laughter, unadulterated, free-spirited, giggle-until-your-sides-ache laughter. The Undead were swept away by golden memories, dipped in liquid joy, delivering the message You are not alone. If my struggles were Monsters, then stories were Warriors. The Wild Thoughts rampaged through the darkness, filling warmth where shadows lurked and painting the streets of my mind in vibrant colors. I wanted to listen to their music, music that was filled with colors instead of shadows, and I longed to breathe in air instead of smoke. So I did. I did because I could. Because the Wild Thoughts were real and they outweighed the Monsters. The Monsters were yet to be tamed and things were yet to be okay but I knew they would be. I knew it with every fiber of my being. Maybe things weren’t perfect, and maybe there were days when the Monsters would roar louder than the Wild Thoughts, but I knew that the sun would rise and I would try again. We would try again. I wasn’t alone anymore, and I didn’t want to be. I had a choice. Zombies could become friends. And old friends didn’t cease to exist the moment you were se
parated. Thoughts about my loved ones filled my heart, gave me the strength to keep pumping. South of my heart, the Beast roamed, but it seemed that a hibernation was in store. Happiness is what filled you up when the well in your soul had been sucked dry. I would be happy, piece by piece, day by day. Until my soul felt full again. The Monsters were what haunted me, but the Wild Thoughts were what drove me to keep fighting.
MORGAN LEVINE
Arasing
TURNING THE CORNER past the tin-roofed temporary buildings, you find a body of bees walking the labyrinth. They—it?—stroll meditatively, each step a humming cloud of yellow and black, hands clasped together so that the arms seem to be a looping stream of activity, bees dodging each other in the deltoid, bouncing down the biceps, swimming along what you would guess to be the extensor carpi ulnaris, but Greg only lets you look at his anatomy textbook for five minutes at a time because he says your little English-major brain wouldn’t be able to handle all the information, so you’re not sure.
The body, Greg likes to say, holds the secrets of the world. Greg, wet granite eyes and copper cleft chin, knows many secrets.
Today he told you:
In high school there was this chick Angie little Argentinian firecracker called me picaflor but I didn’t care her waist was so small I could wrap my hands around it and have the fingers touch.
Stop coughing Joseph breathe think about this while you are inhaling so are your cells but exhaling too it’s faster than you can imagine it’s called cellular respiration there are tiny flickers of motion and exchange within your lungs within your everywhere can you believe that can you believe the miracles happening right now inside you if you learn enough it’s almost like there are no miracles at all.
Oh and Angie yeah that chick she’d make me sing “Angie” to her every night Angie Angie Angie until she fell asleep she loved the Stones she’d get goose bumps that’s called arasing, the muscles under each follicle contract I still think about that like a braille of attraction.
So who’s the poet now Joseph?
You said he had some talent.
He said there’s no such thing. Only practice.
You said training to be a surgeon is different and your voice trailed off so of course the question:
Different from what?
You were too high to argue so you giggled and then everyone giggled for a while.
And then Greg said, his eyes glazing into doughnut holes under the afternoon smoke, that there was a labyrinth tucked away somewhere on campus. Greg said that he himself had tucked the labyrinth in and sang it to sleep sometimes but Greg always talks about his mommy issues when he’s stoned so you said Stop right there Greg, let’s go find the labyrinth, let’s go right now.
Greg agreed, but he ditched you seven minutes ago at Jenny’s dorm because Jenny had just come back from volleyball practice and was slimy like an oyster on the half shell and Greg had the munchies and how could you expect him to resist that anyways, they don’t even wear pants you know. So it was just you walking the route that soon-to-be-Dr. Greg had prescribed, past the environmental issues majors sitting in the trees K-I-S-S-I-N-G, past the European-history professor and his furtive student lover, past the freshmen sobbing into their calculus textbooks. Two marine biologists explored each other’s tentacular tendencies and you thought lazily of Jenny and Greg, entangled in her dorm.
You thought does Jenny know about Angie from Argentina and does Jenny like the Stones. And does he give Jenny goose bumps. And is Jenny satisfied. And could Jenny ever love you. And you were sinking toward dangerous deep-sea thoughts so you rose back to the surface.
Jenny is textbook beautiful (you suspect that’s the reason she holds Greg’s attention), legs up to your ears and prone to the kind of crass wisecracks that pretty girls make when they’re used to being used. She bites her lip when she’s thinking. She chews on pencil erasers. You wonder if she would still do these things if she wasn’t always watched. You want to ask Greg if she does that around him, but that would mean he’d be watching her, so your question gets all tangled inside you and you quit.
You wonder how long one must be loved before a stare stops feeling foreign. Maybe never.
Greg and Jenny are almost something. She hovers around their dorm like an uneasy, elegant insect, folding their laundry and making their beds. She sleeps with him dutifully and answers his constant phone calls with a stoic, almost motherly patience. You, the roommate, are chief witness to their near-being.
You won’t pretend you don’t find Jenny attractive. As a matter of fact, half of your and Greg’s conversations revolve around the two of you finding Jenny attractive—it’s one of the few commonalities between you. But Greg is the only one who can give firsthand accounts of her breasts, so he has the power. You both know that. You both know that.
It’s not like you don’t stare at her a lot. Maybe more than you should. But she has these magic thighs—long, tan, softer than a baby’s ass Greg says. Sometimes you try and think of things softer than those thighs. You imagine the thighs on a sheepskin rug, the thighs kicking through the clouds, the thighs shining in a pool of velvety honey. Magic thighs. Greg likes to wrap one hand around them at parties, on the dorm couch, while driving. You’d think simply resting a hand on a thigh wouldn’t be a driving hazard, but Greg claims the magic thighs distract him from the road, that his vision swims on contact, that’s just how magic they are. You asked whether his books had any kind of anatomical explanation for this phenomenon and he called you a wiseass and never gave an answer, which you took as a kind of victory, your romantic sensibilities triumphing over science. A tiny triumph for you to mark up against all his territorial thigh touches.
One day, you’re going to touch those thighs. You’re going to reach out as she sails by and run one finger down the smoothness of those thighs and she’ll rip her clothes off and tackle you in a soft and yearning fashion and Greg will spontaneously combust. It’s a nice thought.
But right now, for the first time in months, you’re not weighing the risks and rewards of touching Jenny’s thighs. You’re face-to-face with a bee man. You take a half step toward the bees, and a whole step back. You consider doing the hokey pokey.
It’s the ambiguity here that scares you. If it’s a man made of bees then when you say hello it might wave or buzz back or ask you for directions to the dorms because it’s very lost and something terrible has happened. But if it’s a bunch of bees making up a man—that’s a whole different story. They might turn on you. They might drop the pretense and expand into a vicious swarm.
The man stops and looks up. Its face shifts in a way that could be a smile, or a baring of teeth, or a grimace. You wave like it’s a baby, opening and closing your fist. It raises its arm, a club of bees curling into a ball and then exploding out. The hand expands and contracts a few times, and a line of yellow and black snakes out of the rippling rib cage, landing gently on you. You’re mesmerized and statue-still but can’t resist laughing when the bees arrange themselves on your arm. Their tiny feet tickle. They spell H-E-L-L-O.
“Hello,” you say.
I AM BENJAMIN.
“Benjamin. I’m Joseph.”
JOSEPH.
“Yes.”
The bees have dropped just slightly out of formation, their humanoid figure dripping at the edges. You stand, the bees trembling on your skin, feeling your image refracting through thousands of compound eyes. It must seem like there’s a swarm of you too.
“So.” How to ask for a backstory. You dizzy your brain searching for subtlety.
SO. The bees wriggle in the O; you can almost hear the intonation of expectation.
“Can you. Um. Do you sting?” A reasonable question.
YOU MUST NOT TAKE BIO.
“Ha, well, no, actually, I’m focusing on English . . .”
MAKES SENSE.
Pause.
WALK WITH ME.
You step into the labyrinth, eyes on your arm, and follow Benjamin along the c
alming curves.
1 STING = 1 DEAD BEE.
You nod.
I DON’T GET THEM BACK.
“Oh.”
You’ve reached the center. Benjamin faces you, the sun glinting off his many wings like glass.
“What do you study?”
BUSINESS.
“Nice.”
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