Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies

by James Marshall

  “So what’s up?”

  The unicorn doesn’t say anything. That doesn’t surprise me. So far the unicorn hasn’t said anything to me. I don’t think it’s said anything to anyone else, either. It might not be a talking unicorn. It might be a mute. Perhaps it received some sort of horrible shock when it was a young unicorn. Perhaps it needs someone to help it overcome its trust issues. If it does, it should try elsewhere.

  “If you’re trying to communicate with me telepathically,” I tell the unicorn, “it’s not going to work.” I tap my finger against my temple. “No unauthorized access.”

  The unicorn looks at itself in the mirror. Then it looks at me. I look in the mirror and see the unicorn. The biblical beast turns and leaves the bathroom.

  “Do you want me to follow you?” I call after it.

  Whether it wants me to or not, I follow it. It turns a corner at the end of the hallway. When I get there, and turn the same corner, the unicorn is gone. “Okay if you still, or ever did, want me to follow you, you’ve gone some place I can’t go now,” I yell. “And possibly not even later on, either.”

  Baby Doll15 enters the hallway in front of me, where the unicorn disappeared. “Who are you talking to?” she asks.

  “Your unicorn,” I say. “Actually it might not have been yours. It might have just looked like yours. It was a unicorn, though. If you want me to get all metaphysical on you, it might have been a hologram, a robot, or a hallucination.”

  “I’m the only one here,” says Baby Doll15.

  “You haven’t seen your unicorn?”

  “Not lately.”

  “Are you the unicorn?” I ask, suddenly suspicious.

  Baby Doll15 laughs. “You’ve seen us together, Guy Boy Man.”

  “Maybe the unicorn is a physical manifestation of your impressiveness, elusiveness, and, according to nonbelievers, illusiveness.”

  “I’m right here,” she says, holding up her arms. “You can have me.”

  “That’s true,” I admit, still slightly suspicious.

  “I’m real,” she says. “And I’m not going to run away.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Yeah. Of course, yeah. You’re right.”

  I pretend my fears are assuaged, but they’re not. They’re worse now. Stupid fears. Why do they always have to be so scary? I miss the old days when all you had to worry about was where your next meal was coming from, and how to stay dry and warm, and if any wild animals were going to attack you in the night. All the stuff I worry about is so cerebral. When you get attacked by a pack of ravenous wolves, at least you’ve got a chance. There’s no escape from the brain.

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  hurting People is hilarious

  I love you, I love you, I love you.

  I can’t say it. If I say it, I’ll lose all my money. That’s the deal I made with Centaur111.

  When Baby Doll15 and I are talking and laughing, when we’re walking in silence, when we’re happy from being together and flushed with our proximity and smiling because we can’t help it, and looking away from each other self-consciously, when we’re both feeling exactly the same, I can’t say it. The words are anathema to me. (That means bad.) They’re poisonous. Even though I feel their effects, I can’t go back to their cause. I had no idea being this ecstatic could be so wretched. When I look at Baby Doll15, euphorically hurting in parts of my heart and mind I didn’t even know existed, I know it has to end.

  “Where are we going?” asks Baby Doll15, walking out of the castle, followed by her unicorn. Baby Doll15 is wearing an orange baby doll—it clashes with her pink hair—over pink leggings—the baby doll clashes with her leggings too—and orange high heels, which clash with her hair and leggings. The outfit is complimented by me—“Hey, I like your outfit.” “Thanks.”—and complemented by a sparkly silver handbag, which reflects the heavenly peace of her eyes. Her shiny thick hair is curled into perfectly spiralling double helixes.

  I hold out her bomb disposal suit. “We’re going to prison.” I’m already wearing my bomb disposal suit over my usual ceremonial robe, layered over my pirate outfit and guns. My pirate hat—the Pope’s pirate hat—is already inside the enormous mining bulldozer.

  “I don’t want to go to prison,” whines Baby Doll15, stopping, crossing her arms. The unicorn stops next to her.

  I lower the bomb disposal suit, surprised. “Why not? What’s wrong with prison?”

  “It’s depressing.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s great. Come on.” I tip my head at the bulldozer. “You’ll love it. I’ll buy you some cotton candy.”

  She sighs, letting me help her into the bomb disposal suit.

  There’s no way this can last. The words must be spoken. Sooner or later. They become necessary. The feeling, sense, and sentiment must be expressed. What starts as, more or less, nothing becomes, less or more, something, and there’s, seemingly, no need to discuss or document the lack of it (i.e., specifically, see, read, “love”), when, in point of fact, that may be more worthy of investigation, but regardless, the development of love is much like finding yourself at the top of a slide with someone else, and suddenly, without reason, both of you spill down the slide until you hit the ground. The two of you have to get up, dust yourselves off, and either say, “Ouch,” or “That was fun,” because there was a slide there, and you both went down it, whether you intended to or not. You can’t ignore it. You can’t just go your separate ways without discussing what happened.

  It only takes us ten minutes to get to a prison. This is America. We pull up outside. Muzzled zombie parents are walking in and out of the maximum-security facility, holding hands with their still-human children, who’re eating candied apples and clutching the strings of heliumfilled balloons. Overhead, a big neon sign scrolls and flashes: “Open to all ages!”

  “I’m telling you right now,” says Baby Doll15, as I easily crash and smash four SUVs and three mid-sized sedans out of my parking spot, “I am not going to the showers.”

  “Okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Whatever you want, Baby.” I help her out of the bulldozer. Her gold and diamond ball and chain tumbles down after her, banging once harmlessly into the backs of her bomb disposal suit-covered legs and then down onto the ground.

  “Here comes your unicorn,” I say, awkwardly lifting my arm, encased in the bomb disposal suit, pointing out the animal, running down a rainbow that ends in the parking lot nearby.

  “It’s not my unicorn,” she insists.

  Watching it walk toward us, I marvel at its beauty, its grace and elegance. I watch its massive muscles move under its glowing white skin. I stare at its white mane and tail, moving with the wind it creates with its purposeful stride. If pride is a sin, this unicorn should be forgiven. But forgiveness is a slippery slope.

  Tumbling down the important and meaningful slide, like Baby Doll15 and I did, is an event. When you get to the bottom of it, certain questions must be answered. Certain decisions need to made: Did you both intend to go down the slide? Whether you did or not, did you both enjoy it enough to forget any reluctance or unwillingness? Did you like it enough to justify climbing the ladder again? If not, how do you say you’ve had enough without hurting your playmate’s feelings, or are you the kind of person who only thinks of your own enjoyment? If you aren’t, are you willing to sacrifice your own happiness for the continued happiness of your friend? If you won’t, how badly should you feel for the disappointment you cause and for how long? Worse, what if you enjoyed it but your partner didn’t, and says so, or seems to have not, but says otherwise? Do you try to persuade him or her? Or do you put his or her feelings ahead of your own, and turn trembling away, with a tear trickling down your rosy cheek, and face the rest of the day on your own? It’s such complicated fun, isn’t it?

  After we take off our bomb disposal suits, Baby Doll15 and I walk to a hot dog stand in front of the prison. After we place our orders, and Baby Doll15 gets hers filled, the vendor takes my wiener
in his sanitary gloved hand. He holds my wiener in his sanitary gloved hand for quite a while. Then he slides it into a bun and hands it to me. He’s got a white hot-dog-vendor hat. It’s not a pirate hat, but it’s pretty cool.

  I’m American so I love the prison system. I wish it were more cruel and unusual, though. Also, I wish it weren’t so systemically prejudiced. It discriminates against straight people. (The prison system is Club Med for homosexuals who love discipline and routine.) It also discriminates against the innocent, forcing them to commit crimes if they want to gain admittance, and it discriminates against the guilty, preventing them from paying taxes and doing things like listening to their children crying.

  Nearby, kids are getting their faces painted. Some guy holding a stack of thick books is walking around, yelling about how we need to buy our programs, without our programs we won’t know who we’re looking at or what they’ve done, they’ll just look like regular people sitting in a jail cell, and we won’t know what names to call them or why we should be infuriated with them. I wave him over and buy a couple.

  It might interest you to know that prisons aren’t full of zombies. They’re full of living people. Ninety-five percent of the prison population is mentally ill. (Too irrational, irresponsible, and unpredictable to become zombies.) It’s obvious that none of these [usually poor (black) people] would’ve ever committed the crimes for which they were convicted, if they’d received proper medical treatment, or if the proper medical treatment existed, or if they’d been raised in loving homes, or if their loving homes hadn’t been located in furiously angry neighbourhoods, or if they had any good luck whatsoever. The five percent of the prison population that isn’t mentally ill is actually very mentally ill. They’d need around-the-clock medical care. That’d cost a lot. [It’s cheaper to let innocent people get killed, and to house, clothe, and feed the killers afterwards, because there’s usually a really (financially) inexpensive period when the killers are growing up and struggling (alone or among friends and family) with their dysfunctional minds.] Roughly thirty percent of the entire prison population is actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted, but they’re still mentally ill, and there’s nowhere else to keep them so cheaply.

  Baby Doll15 and I are leafing through our programs and enjoying the last of our hotdogs when suddenly we’re attacked by a roving gang of vegetarians! The scrawny vegetable-lovers slap at us, weakly. In a serious state of nonpanic and mild discomfort, Baby Doll15 and I hunch up our shoulders and move around, trying to keep our backs to the violent vegetarians, groaning annoyed things like, “Come on,” and “Cut it out,” and “You’re going to knock off my pirate hat, you ugly, misguided, vegetarian slut.” That last one was me in case you were wondering.

  All of a sudden, the unicorn attacks! It gores the vegetarians! It really concentrates on their private parts! The bumper crop of blood gushes onto my ceremonial white gown, my face, and pirate hat! Bright red bucketsful of vegetarian ooze showers onto Baby Doll15’s face, hair, and baby doll! It even coats her high heels! It’s kind of hot!

  “Jesus,” I say, when it’s finally over, flicking my soaked hands down while leaning forward so blood drips off my face onto the ground. I don’t want to get it on my ceremonial gown, even though the redness beads and dances away (like water off a waxed car) from the high-tech fabric. Interestingly, it doesn’t stain the Pope’s hat, either. “Why are vegetarians so in-your-face? Are they hanging out in Africa, slap-attacking lions for eating gazelles?”

  “I don’t know,” says Baby Doll15, fingertip-picking her soaked outfit away from her skin.

  “That unicorn sure looks after you,” I observe.

  “Yeah,” she says, looking down at what she’s doing. “Maybe too much.”

  The white unicorn is pink as Baby Doll15’s hair. Its coat is divided into millions of wet Vs where the wetness pulls hairs together. The unicorn is male. Now, covered in the blood of its victims, it looks feminine. It looks like love.

  I’m glad I fell down the slide with Baby Doll15, and I want to tell her I enjoyed it, and I want to do it again, again and again, forever, but I can’t say so. I keep hoping she’ll let me keep spilling down the slide with her, and we won’t have to talk about it, but I know, sooner or later, we will, and the idea strikes such fear in me, I realize I’ve never known fear before, and the thought of hurting her disgusts me to the point that I recognize I’ve never felt true disgust before— and I’ve seen a lot of gross (translation: awesome) stuff, and I thought I was completely desensitized, but maybe it wasn’t that I thought so much as hoped (foolishly)—and I keep trying to think of some way around it, some loophole in the law of love that the team of lawyers in my mind can help me wiggle through, but conviction seems unavoidable. I will be sentenced.

  After Baby Doll15 and I wipe the blood from our eyes, we walk toward the prison. A muzzled zombie couple ambles toward us, leaving the prison with their arms outstretched toward us, like they want us, which they do, obviously, because they’re zombies and they want to eat or infect Baby Doll15 and me because she and I are living people, but for a moment I get the sense that their arms are stretched out toward us for another reason, but I don’t know what it is. The zombie couple accompanies their still-human son. He’s a cute little guy, probably four or five years old. He’s eating a candy apple, taking great big bites of that sweet treat.

  When we get close enough, I tell the kid, “Your parents are zombies and they spend every day making the world a horrible place for you to live in, and then one day they’re going to bite you, probably when you’re not even paying attention, so you become a zombie too, and then you’ll live in eternal undead torment, and you’ll have to eat human beings to survive, just like your parents, and you’ll have to find an ugly zombie wench like your mom here and you’ll have to do gross, terrible, and disgusting things to her to feed her, to kill her other hunger, so she pukes up babies that you can turn into even more zombies.”

  The kid starts crying. He holds up the candy apple like it’s the Olympic torch and runs away. His parents stumble after him, mindlessly.

  “Nice, Guy Boy Man,” says Baby Doll15, shaking her head. “Nice.”

  “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  My conviction. My prison. I’ll be sentenced because of my inability to utter the only sentence I want to scream at the top of my lungs into the ears of every living and dead, sentient and thoughtless, animal, vegetable, and mineral in every world, real or imagined: I love you, Baby Doll15. And if I were allowed more than one sentence, I’d use them all. It’s sick how much I love you, Baby Doll15. In a ritualistic Christian kind of way, I want to eat your body and drink your blood and somehow become you, seeing me, so I can love myself as much as I know you do, and I want you to do the same to me, so you can see how much I love you, more, I know, than you love yourself, so much more, it’s impossible that I can like you when I love you this much, because I hate you for not looking after yourself as well as I would, and for getting involved with the dislikes of me, because I hold you, tightly, in so much higher esteem than you hold yourself. I’d be a princess, a queen, an angel, if I were blessed enough to be myself inside you, and perhaps, in a glowing white gown, with solar wind pressing the silk to your skin, floating it away into the cold night of everywhere you aren’t, looking into a mirror in Heaven, you could see yourself as I do, as I see you, and you’d know how much you mean to me, and if I had eternity, I’d give it all to you to keep torturing me, and if I had infinity, I’d use every bit of it to torture you right back.

  Inside the prison, Baby Doll15 and I stop in front of a cell where you can throw softballs at an embezzler. Three for a hundred bucks. I give the prison guard a thousand dollars. He looks from side to side, nonchalantly. Then he sticks the money into his back pocket.

  “What’s to stop him from throwing the balls back at us?” asks Baby Doll15.

  “Daily beatings,” says the guard, nodding. He must get the question a lot. “For
the most part it’s the daily beatings, but there’s also the substandard food. The whole institutional feel of the place tends to wear down the spirit after a while. Plus, I’ve got Mace, a baton, and a gun. If you want, I can show you how I beat a prisoner. My technique is flawless. Everybody says so.”

  “Sounds good,” I say, turning to the still-bloody version of Baby Doll15. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t want to see that.”

  The prison guard and I exchange looks. Women. They’re lucky they’re hot and have vaginas, breasts, and nice tight asses. Otherwise, evolution would’ve deselected them a long time ago.

  I launch softballs at the prisoner, who cowers on his bunk, covering his head with his arms. Most of the balls bounce back off the bars.

  “You’ve got to hit him three times to get a stuffed animal,” says the guard.

  “This game sucks,” I declare, walking up to the bars. “It’s rigged.” I demonstrate with my last softball. “Look. The balls barely fit through the bars.”

  “Got to make it challenging,” shrugs the guard. “Don’t be sore, though. You only got to hit him one more time to win your girl a stuffed animal.”

  It’s funny how words can make your heart ache, your heart break, sometimes. “Your girl.” Those symbols and sounds are so important to me right now. I want to hold onto them. I want to keep them. You can’t, though. You can’t save words. They go bad.

  I throw the last ball and hit the embezzler right in the arm he’s using to cover his head. “Did you see that?” I say, turning to Baby Doll15, excited. “I got him right in the arm he’s using to cover his head!”

  “I saw it,” says Baby Doll15, unimpressed.

  “Wait until I tell all the hot young girls hanging out in my castle! Nobody is going to believe it! Damn it, Baby. You should’ve been recording it on your phone!”

  “Don’t worry,” she says, coldly. “They’ll believe it.” She turns away from me. “People will believe anything.”