On Borrowed Time

by Jenn McKinlay

  “We look amazing, right?” Mel asked. She spread her arms wide to include her entire crew.

  “What are you?” Joyce asked.

  “The baking dead,” Oz said from the van.

  “Niiiice.” Tate nodded.

  “Yeah, I’ll give you that one,” Marty agreed and exchanged a complicated handshake with Oz.

  Mel approached her mother, who only flinched a little when she drew near. “Thanks for watching the bakery so we could work the zombie walk, Mom.”

  “No, problem,” Joyce said. “But, honey, really I just have to say that white foundation you have on, well, it’s really not terribly flattering and now that you’re single, you really might want to consider a little blush and maybe a less prominent eye shadow.”

  “I’m supposed to look like a zombie,” Mel said. “I’m pretty sure they don’t wear blush or eye shadow.”

  “Lipstick?”

  “No,” Mel said.

  Joyce heaved a beleaguered sigh, turned and walked back into the bakery.

  “Really?” Mel said to Angie. “She’s worried about my pasty foundation but she blithely ignores the fact that I have a gaping wound on my head.”

  “She’s just looking out for you,” Angie said. “Maybe you’ll meet a nice undead lawyer at the zombie walk and she’ll stop worrying.”

  “There’s only one lawyer I’m interested in,” Mel said. “And as far as I know he is alive and kicking.”

  Angie gave her a half hug as if trying to bolster her spirits. The love of Mel’s life was Joe DeLaura, the middle of Angie’s seven older brothers. A few months ago, Joe had rejected Mel’s proposal of marriage even though he had already proposed to her and she’d said yes. As Mel explained to her mother, it was complicated.

  The truth was that Mel had gotten cold feet at the “until death us do part” portion of the whole marriage package, but she had worked through it. Unfortunately, when she had gotten over her case of the wiggins and proposed to Joe, he’d just taken on the trial of a notorious mobster, who was known for wriggling off justice’s barbed hook by murdering anyone who tried to lock him up.

  Joe had walked away from Mel to keep her from being a target. To Mel it still felt like rejection. She didn’t handle that sort of thing well and in the past three months had gained fifteen pounds from comfort eating. For that alone, she hoped Joe brought his mobster to justice.

  “Come on, ladies, it’s ‘time to nut up or shut up,’” Tate said as he dropped an arm around Mel and Angie’s shoulders and began to herd them to the van.

  “Zombieland,” Mel and Angie identified the movie together.

  The swapping of movie quotes was one of the foundations of their friendship. Mel and Tate had met first in middle school, but then Angie had come along and the three friends had spent weekends in Tate’s parents’ home theater watching old movies and eating junk food. Ever since they had played a game of stumping one another with movie quotes.

  These days just the memory of those happier times made Mel glum. Why did it seem like everything was so difficult now?

  “Chin up, Undead Chef,” Tate said. “We’re going to go sell cupcakes to the shambling masses and make an arm and a leg in profit.”

  “Ba dum dum,” Angie made the sound of a drummer’s rim shot.

  Mel rolled her eyes. “I guess that’s better than making a killing.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Angie said with a laugh.

  “Aw, come on. It’s a zombie walk finished off with an outdoor big screen showing of the Night of the Living Dead,” Tate said. “How could we have anything but a good time?”