Ophelia Immune: A Novel

by Mattson, Beth

  “Hector, my friend,” Dad called, lacing his boots, “Help me dig a foundation for a gazebo. We’re going to have a Party.”

  “Juliet,” Mom said, “Come to the Kitchen with me. You can use Ophelia's crayons to decorate invitations. Ophelia, could you bring your crayons and cut some of the scrap cardboard into squares before you chop more wood?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  The weather grew muggy and then miserable and sweaty. The mosquitoes flew in clouds and the stream gushed over its banks, swallowing the Southern third of the Yard. We were on the constant lookout for things with wide, watery eyes and slack jaws – fish or zombies wading through the submersed Lawn.

  Dad removed the big glass windowpanes from the House and stored them in the Kitchen loft, replacing them with mesh screens so that we could enjoy a breeze without the bugs. Hector and Juliet came down with a Summer fever. Mom called it Wobble Pox and said it wasn't serious. She said that all kids got it once and then were done with it. She made sure that I hugged them and entertained them a lot, but I never got the itchy bumps or silly walk that gave the pox their name. She frowned that I wasn't going to catch it and be done with it, but she tried to reassure me that no matter how short I was, I'd never been sickly and should count it as a blessing.

  After their fevers broke, Juliet and Hector were both itchy and stumbling across the bedroom. All five of us giggled at their poor balance and speckled cheeks. Aside from slapping their scratching fingers away from their splotches, we didn't have anything to worry about.

  “But why don’t I have Wobble Pox?” I asked again, still checking my arms for blisters, jealous of all the honeyed water that they were drinking and another rite of passage that I'd missed.

  “You must be Immune, Ophelia,” Dad congratulated me on my sturdy inner ear that wasn’t susceptible to the germs, but I would have rather been tucked snugly alongside the little kids, munching on rice crackers until their fevers were low enough to run outside and play again. “Let's go, Ophelia, the air's dried out and we only have three weeks left until your Birthday. I want to frame the Gazebo and cut some sod from the edges of the Yard to patch all the muddy holes near the House.”

  I trudged behind his wheelbarrow, garden shovel in hand, rolling and unrolling grass swathes until he thought that I had the knack of it, and then he left me to the landscaping while he squared and nailed the frame of the Gazebo that he was building. He whistled while he worked, and no matter how crabby I was to be missing honeyed water, it was better to have him as a peer than to be eating all of the free bee sugar that I wanted.

  “How does it look Ophelia?” he called from atop a support beam.

  “Looks great!” I smeared a clot of mud across my forehead when I tried to wipe away my sweat.

  “Don't worry, Bean! When I am finished with this Gazebo, we'll all sit up here with honeyed water! Nothing to repair if the zombies walk through at night! Just a big, gorgeous porch with benches that we can use to enjoy our view! Before, during and after the Party.”

  I whistled as I worked after that, too. Having a strong immune system and building the Future was better than getting pampered for being sick. Doing Yard work and stomping on the sod gave me an excuse to be barefoot and pretend that the Older Girls were blades of grass. Dad was starting on the birch shingles when the only zombie we had seen all day crawled out of the woods. I shoved my feet into my sneakers and whipped the laces into knots.

  “You got it, Bean?”

  “Yeah, I got it. It's just crawling.”

  It was a naked, ex-teenaged-girl zombie, struggling to pull itself into the Yard, slipping on the grass. It had dragged its bare, pale green belly across a rough knot on a log and the new cut on its belly oozed sticky, black ex-blood from its distended organs. It had been feeding. Its face was plastered with maroon crust and brown fur. It didn’t have finger tips, just ten equal-length scratching stubs, working their way closer and closer to my feet. Its only prize was a pair of shiny keys clenched between broken knuckles.

  I stood in front of it, watching the raw bones in its knees and the un-healing crack in its back. It had been crawling for a while. That was probably what had happened to its clothes. They had probably been scraped off on rocks and branches that it had crawled over, or torn off by whatever it had been eating. I felt badly that it had no bra. It took a tremendously long time to grow into a bra and it seemed particularly unjust that its sapling breasts had to scrape across sticks and weeds while I clubbed its head in. I whispered it assurances that it was no longer Human, and that I was doing it a kindness.

  It didn’t look up. Its head was stuck in the down position, gazing permanently at its own crooked arms and inverted elbows until it collapsed – its fair, freckled bottom unabashedly mooning me; its black, sludgy ex-brains coating my hammer. It didn’t even twitch when I rolled it onto the tarp, its keys jingling sadly in its stiff fist. It slumped on top of the Burn Pile with the other half-decayed corpses waiting to be burned.

  I soothed the grass back into a standing position where I had dragged the body across the sod. Hector wandered past me wearing nothing but his bib overalls. He stumbled a bit and was still scratching at pock marks, so I leaned over to scooped him up to powder him with some clean dust to keep the last of the Summer bugs off of him, but he shrieked at the top of his lungs.

  “Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine!” he yelled and clenched the pair of silver keys to his chest, the keys that had fallen out of the zombies hand as I dragged it.

  He tried to put them in his mouth. I wrenched them away from him and squeezed him around the middle while I patted him with dust. He screamed until Mom stuck her head out the window, Juliet's bath washcloth dripping in her hand.

  “Ophelia! What are you doing?!”

  “Just dusting him.”

  “Well, stop it, right now. Why is he so upset?”

  “I took some keys away from him.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because he found them in the dead, Infected hand of a zombie!”

  “Well, wash them and give them back.”

  “What? No!”

  “Be nice,” she said, “You are supposed to teach him.”

  “I know, but Mom!”

  She frowned more intensely, “He is the only little brother you have, and you would do well to remember that you used to hope that he would be exciting. Now, take him and show him how to string the green beans across the shed roof to dry.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  I dragged him to the shed by the back of his overalls, like a string of beans himself. He ran off while I tied a knot in the slick floss that Mom used to string them, but I found him and showed him how to do something more exciting – how to sharpen a stick into a spear. I tried to teach him tricks all week long. I blew kisses to Juliet, who helped Mom stir pots, but Mom was right. Before I knew what it meant, I had wished that he wouldn’t be boring. I had wished for him to be Interesting.

  I took it upon myself to enjoy his silly games and help make them productive. Every time that Mom frowned at me for yelling at him, I would try to make the boring chores more bearable. In return for teaching him how to do a handstand on the chopping stump, he taught me how to slingshot three acorns at a squirrel in a row, so that the third caught it off guard and hit it on the head. Juliet and I both learned his technique of painting our toenails black with mud that didn’t flake off when it dried, and we showed him how to start a fire with only a single match. We enjoyed his antics and he occasionally focused for long enough to master a new common skill.

  “That's really great of you, Ophelia. You take good care of them,” Dad squeezed my shoulders as we looked out from the deck of the finished Gazebo. “Your Mom and I are so proud of you. Immogen would be, too.”

  I sniffled into his sweaty, sawdust-y shirt. Juliet was turning cartwheels and Hector was hanging from a branch by his knees. They both waved. Juliet blew a kiss, Hector blew his nose.

  “Come on,” he said, “I have an ea
rly Birthday present for you.”

  Upstairs, in my blue map room, there was a new set of hooks on the wall, next to the hooks where I hung my ax and hammer.

  “Do you know what these new, extra hooks are for?” Dad asked, eyes gleaming.

  “No,” I perked up.

  Dad opened my closet, which had been perfectly empty earlier in the day. But now, propped against one wall, was a small Rifle.

  “It’s a .22 caliber,” he said, picking it up.

  I gasped. A Gun!

  “And we have a whole box full of Ammo,” he pointed to a small cardboard box on the floor, full of shells, “I can teach you how to fire it, and maybe in the Winter you and I can go hunting for some small game.”

  “Ok!” I exclaimed, hugging him and then running my fingers of over the barrel that he held carefully in his hands, pointing it the opposite direction from wherever I stood, no matter how I stepped.

  “But,” he said staring into my eyes seriously, “When I am not with you, this Gun, a Gun for the whole family, is to stay on this wall in your room. No touching it when you are alone.”

  I nodded sincerely.

  He hung it up on its new hooks, at a complimentary diagonal to my ax and hammer. I thought that the cardboard box of shells looked nice next to my collection of thick, heavy walking sticks, my map, and sharpened crayons. It fit right in.

  I delightedly shut myself in a quiet corner of my closet. I closed my eyes in the comforting dark and pictured the new Gun hanging on my wall. It had a matte black barrel, with a polished cherry stock to hold against my shoulder. And it was hanging in My Room. Next to My Closet. Ready if Dad or I needed to grab it and fire at the undead from our bedroom window. We could do that now, when we had enough Ammo. Kill the filth at a distance.

  What a Luxury! I wondered how many water well pumps Dad had had to fix before he could afford it. And how many more he would have to fix to buy more shells. I dreamed that he and I fixed so many pumps, and Mom made so many jars of crabapple sauce, that we had boxes and boxes of shells to spare. We killed zombies for the whole county. All of the Older Girls clapped and cheered and apologized until Dad woke me up and laughed at the crick in my neck from sleeping all night in a closet.

  “Rise and shine, Creaky,” he sang-song, “It's Party Day and the screens need repairing.”

  A deer, of all things, had leapt up through the screen, had kicked about in the living room and then exited through the other side of the House, so I had two spots to repair and lots of hoof prints to sweep before the first of the guests arrived.

  I grumbled as I squatted and reached for the wire. My fingers hurt from winding tiny pieces through tiny holes and then stretching them to wrap them around the little pegs on the wooden frame. Mom took Juliet to sweep out the Kitchen and Dad left Hector with me while he laid out the firewood that I had chopped for the roasting pit. Hector was actually pretty good at fixing the mesh. His fidgety, little fingers were particularly agile at stretching the screen towards the wooden frame.

  I growled at him to stop dragging his feet around on the floor.

  “Not,” he said, pouting his lower lip, “Nope.”

  A zombie head popped up in front of our faces and smushed its broken nose against the screen. I fell backwards. Where had it come from? Mom and Juliet were still busy in the Kitchen, Dad was busy fixing potholes in the driveway. None of us had seen it approaching. Nor heard it. And then I realized why.

  It was an ex-ten-year-old boy zombie, wandering around in his football shorts and jersey. His throat had been slit, right through his voice pipe. He couldn’t make a noise, but his head wasn’t flopping very much from the gash in his neck. In fact, he very effectively used his head to ram at us through the screen, ripping the repaired patch. It used its fused spine and skull as a battering ram.

  Hector handed me my hammer like the smart kid that he was starting to be. I took a swing at it before it could climb all of the way in. My hammer collided solidly, but nothing happened. It just crawled closer towards us.

  Hector chattered and squeaked at it. I hit it again and again, dull thud after dull thud. I broke some of its skin, but no bone. I couldn’t crack the skull. I swung faster and faster, hitting it repeatedly, but it wouldn’t collapse. It had the thickest cranium I had ever struck. Hector screamed and handed me a hack saw.

  I went for the gash already leaking shiny, black ooze from the ghoul’s neck. I pushed down hard, ripping it back and forth against solid and soft tissue alike until the body stopped flapping. The head lolled and rolled across the floor, still snapping its jaws at us. I used a towel to toss the decapitated head into an aluminum bucket. Hector mimicked the noise, shlupp-pang.

  I kicked the limp body out through the screens, onto the sod I had been tending. I sighed. Now I would have to repair the screens and the sod all over again, and clean the floors before any of the guests arrived. Hector was too small to lug the whole corpse over to the Burn Pile, but he was big enough to carry a bucket with a head in it. I pushed it toward him.

  “Take this to the Burn Pile.”

  He looked up at me.

  “You know how?”

  He nodded.

  “You need to burn this head, because I couldn’t break the skull.”

  He nodded again, picked up the bucket and carried it away, singing to himself and swinging it from side to side. I rolled my eyes and reached for the pliers and another piece of twine.

  The Picnic

  My cousin, Judy, and her husband, Donnie, were the first to arrive for our Picnic, well before nightfall. Judy was the only family we had in the North. She and I were almost the same age – Judy was barely seventeen – but she was much, much taller than I was. She hadn’t grown up in a car. She was a Hiker and grew up wiping the slime from a tent roof every morning. She had gotten to use her legs. She was married by the time they had reached the North. She had a daughter almost Juliet’s age. Her husband, Donnie, who was at least thirty, bought her a car and they drove it like it was citrus Ribbon Candy on wheels. I was supposed to like him just because he had proposed to Judy instead of buying her. But is it any better to watch a daughter go off into the world with a Sleazeball just because he promised to feed her instead of leaving cash or food in her place? Was Judy even telling the truth? We wouldn’t even know if they were too embarrassed to admit they’d made a monied trade.

  Their beat-up, patched-up Apollo inched its way down our driveway. Judy fixed her dyed yellow, straightened hair in the rearview mirror. Dad and I had speculated that she thought she was a blonde stork in high heels, who brought the sweetest baby around. Like she wasn’t going to have to peel potatoes just because her nails were painted. Just because she aspired through any means possible.

  Her precious, equally groomed daughter, Hannah, was strapped into a car seat in the back. Mom strolled towards them as they parked, flowery head scarf limp in the still, late Summer air. She was gripping Juliet by the one hand that wasn’t waving excitedly. Juliet had been told that Hannah was her age and tried to skip ahead to see her potential playmate.

  Dinged car doors tinged with rust clicked open. Figures appeared backlit in the in the glare and stretched their limbs.

  “Hello! Welcome to the Farm!” Mom embraced Judy’s wrinkle-free sundress, revealing her well-moisturized, creamy, Light Brown skin. Judy edged away as quickly as she could to smooth herself out.

  “Hey, there’s a Little Squirt,” Uncle Donnie – as we were instructed ahead of time to call him, even though he was just married to our cousin – bellowed at Juliet, towering over her, his pasty, pink jowls sweating in the sun.

  Hannah was released from her restraints and leapt out of the car in her own barely dishevelled sundress. She looked at Juliet’s ragged overalls. She turned her nose up, but Uncle Donnie nudged her towards Juliet.

  “Hannah here is only half a year behind you, Juliet. She just turned three and a half.”

  Juliet took her turn to turn her nose up. Six months was a long time
in her estimation. I agreed. Judy was barely a year older than me, but we had nothing in common. She was thirteen when she gave birth to Hannah, and I was glad I had never met her parents who had let her get married so young. Uncle Donnie was old, flabby, loud and a strange rose-liver color. The money to buy a car didn’t make him any less gross.

  Hector showed no such taste. He ran up to Hannah. They looked at each other. He was old enough to catch her eye, so she didn’t mind that he chattered and clicked his tongue instead of talking. They embraced and ran off to play, hand in hand. I twiddled my fingers sympathetically at Juliet as I dragged the ex-ten-year-old’s headless corpse across the Lawn on the blue tarp. If I was fast enough, nobody would know that we had a fresh zombie to mingle with the scent of the baking bread.

  I put my gloves away and folded the tarp inside of the shed, fluffing the grass back into place where I had flattened it. By the time I was finished, the Millers had arrived too. Mrs. Miller was talking with Judy about Hannah’s teeny, tiny – hardly noticeable, really! – overbite and the possibility of a reversal of fortunes via chewing on apples. They were sure that Hannah’s gorgeous complexion could be spared Donnie’s liver-spots through the use of lemon juice on her cheeks every morning. Mom chimed in that she didn’t know if apples and lemons would help teeth and faces, but that her bread loaves would make strong arms for whoever helped carry them to the cooling shelf.

  Judy and Mrs. Miller twittered and continued discussing Hannah’s ever so slight, barely existent flaws as the sun sank on the horizon. I hopped up the steps and into the Kitchen to pat Mom on the arm. She smiled, but her cheeks were deep red with oven heat. She stirred a pot of crabapple sauce above the stove until it thickened and placed it on the table to gel. She put away her apron, held the pendulum back until the springs caught it and then released it to thwap away against the wall. Day One of the Party was almost over; Day Two of the Party would be the real Feast.