The Living Dead 2

I might be the last person in Augusta, though. That wouldn’t be hard. Did you ever see Augusta before the angel-virus? It was a burnt-out hole. It is a burnt-out hole. Just about every year, the Ke

And you know, way back in the pilgrim days, or Maine’s version of them, which starts in the 1700s sometime, there was a guy named James Purington who freaked out one winter and murdered his whole family with an axe. Eight children and his wife. They hanged him and buried him at the crossroads so he wouldn’t come back as a vampire. Which would seem silly, except, well, look around. The point is life in Augusta has been both shitty and deeply warped for quite some time. So we greeted this particular horrific circumstance much as Mainers have greeted economic collapse and the total disregard of the rest of the country for the better part of forever: with no surprise whatsoever. Anyway, I haven’t seen anyone else on the pink and healthy side in a long time. A big group took off for Portland on foot a few months ago (the days of Kermit and Company), but I stayed behind. I have to think of my father. I know that sounds bizarre, but there’s nothing like a parent who bites you to make you incapable of leaving them. Incapable of not wanting their love. I’ll probably turn thirty and still be stuck here, trying to be a good daughter while his blood dries on the kitchen tiles.

Cha

And if Cha

What Is a Zombie?

by Caitlin Zielinski

Grade…well, if the college were still going I guess I’d be Grade 14.

A zombie is not a reanimated corpse. This was never a Night of the Living Dead scenario. The word zombie isn’t even right-a zombie is something a voudoun priest makes, to obey his will. That has nothing to do with the price of coffee in Augusta. My dad didn’t die. His skin ruptured and he got boils and he started snorting instead of talking and bleeding out of his eyes and lunging at Mr. Almeida next door with his fingernails out, but he didn’t die. If he didn’t die, he’s not a corpse. QED, Cha

A zombie is not a ca

A zombie is not mindless. Cha

Zombies will not kill anything that moves. My dad hasn’t bitten me. He could have, plenty of times. They’re not harmless. I’ve had to get good at ru

There’s something else I know. It’s hard to talk about, because I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it because I’m not a zombie. It’s like a secret society, and I’m on the outside. I can watch what they do, but I don’t know the code. I couldn’t tell Cha

This is what I know: One night, my father picked up our toaster and left the house. I’m not overly attached to the toaster, but he didn’t often leave. I feed him good hamburger, nice and raw, and I don’t knock him in his brainpan with a bat. Zombies know a good thing.

The next night he took the hallway mirror. Then the microwave, then the coffeepot, then a sack full of pots and pans. All the zombie movies in the world do not prepare you to see your father, his hair matted with blood, his bathrobe torn and seeping, packing your cooking materiel into a flowered king-size pillowcase. And then one night he took a picture off of the bookshelf. My mother, himself, and me, smiling in one of those terrible posed portraits. I was eight or nine in the picture, wearing a green corduroy jumper and big, long brown pigtails. I was smiling so wide, and so were they. You have to, in those kinds of portraits. The photographer makes you, and if you don’t, he practically starts turning cartwheels to get you to smile like an angel just appeared over his left shoulder clutching a handful of pins. My mother, her glasses way too big for her face. My father, in plaid fla