Mad Moonlit Musings of a Zombie Huntress

There is no glamour to be found in death. That’s the one truth that no teenager can manage to get through his or her thick skull to penetrate the adolescent brain beneath. Hell, you believed it yourself before you died, didn’t you? Now, though, you know what dead people do. They decompose. The only thing in this world that they’ll ever do again is stink.

Before you died, you used to think that there was something romantic and glorious about dying young. Your classmates stand in tight groups in the funeral parlor, casting spurious sideways glances towards your coffin, all of them red-eyed and snuffling. Everybody talks about you in hushed whispers, recalling every time they saw you; what they said, what you said. You’re suddenly more popular than the quarterback. They dedicate the yearbook ‘in memory of’ you. Wowsa, recognition at last!

For a day or two. Within a week, you’re in the ground and they’ve replaced you as editor of the school paper, a new kid is sitting at your desk in computer club, and the quarterback has stopped telling stories about how you helped him in math. Instead, he has returned to his hobby of banging that bitch Heather McDarmid in the back seat of the car Daddy gave her for Christmas.

Within a year, only the newspaper and computer geeks can recall what you looked like. Within five years, everybody has left any memory of you behind in the hallowed halls of high school and they’ve moved on. Most went to college, but some started families. Good old Heather is already making a fortune at some bullshit job in Daddy’s company. The quarterback is now a used car salesman with the start of male pattern baldness and two kids cementing him forever to that shrew he knocked up after Heather dumped him.

You’re frozen in time. You died in high school and the world didn’t end. Even your mother stopped getting all misty-eyed at the sound of your name. That picture of you that she keeps on the piano actually has dust on it.

You’ve become a statistic, another teenage suicide linked to Goth-ism, the occult and heavy metal music. This connection was made because you owned three black t-shirts, one CD of The Greatest Metal Bands of All Time, and a star-shaped dark purple candle. You were still shy, even though your braces had come off a year ago and your skin had cleared up. Combined with the evidence of your meager possessions, shy equated to withdrawn, a lingering reluctance to smile became evidence of sullenness. Of course you committed suicide. You had been showing all of the warning signs, hadn’t you?

In the weeks following your burial there was a lot of ranting about metal music and teenage suicide. Nobody mentioned the living death that is the natural state of kids like you. Every school has a few, those outcast children who scuttle through the halls with their heads tucked between their shoulders, the great hoards of the never-there. Teachers know that they can call upon you in class if they’re stuck for a student who has actually read the assignment, but none of them ever actually speak to you. Not their job.

All of this you watch from the shadows as you linger after your sudden and painful separation from your physical self. You could go any time, but you stubbornly cling to these streets, your house, this town. The sight of your broken, frail body as the policemen pull you from the river moves you to tears that you can’t shed. Above you, a white light constantly beckons, around you the world still spins. You, though, you’re dead and buried and the son-of-a-bitch that killed you is still walking around and his life is going on just like everybody else’s. Well, everybody else’s but yours. You’re decomposing.

You follow him, shouting in your unheard voice to your mother, to your teachers, even to the quarterback. Nobody hears you, nobody alive anyway. Your fellow dead hear you, they just don’t care. Even the two other girls you watch the son-of-a-bitch kill, while your fists pass harmlessly through his body and your unheard screams fill the night, don’t care. They just throw their arms wide and are taken, smiling, into that compellingly beautiful white light.

Why do you stay in this hellish state of Limbo? Is this state of non-being easier for you than for the others because you were hardly there even when you were alive? Five years of effort and you have yet to make anybody even feel a chill when you hover in the same space they occupy, but still you stubbornly cling to this world trying to somehow stop the son-of-a-bitch.

The light calls, beckoning you. It hints at acceptance, recognition, even love. You were never actually loved, you think. You weren’t real enough to love. You were real for three days, and you spent those days lying in state as classmates trooped by to peer curiously at your dead face and your older relatives whispered to each other that the undertaker had made you look ‘very good’ and ‘lifelike’. You make a note to self: Next life request a closed casket topped by a photograph, because this just blows.

You see a stranger in the coffin, somebody who looks so unlike you that you check the name posted at the door of the viewing room that your light blue casket occupies. Of course it’s blue, you hated blue. To you, the girl in the coffin looks ready for her big screen debut, not for the box to be closed and dirt to be shoveled down into the hole in which she will get on with the business of decomposing. Skin color obscured by pancake makeup, cheeks rouged, lips ruby red, they even make your eyelashes thicker somehow. All of the bruised and broken places are skillfully covered over and concealed, and is that actually cotton balls packing your cheeks? "Eeeewwww, Gross!" would have been the comment of the alive version of you. You know this because it is the comment of the dead version of you.

"If only, if only..." The litany chases itself around your non-corporeal brain for days at a time. "If only I hadn’t liked the view of downtown from that damned bridge so much. If only I could make myself seen, heard, felt by SOMEBODY, we could nail the son-of-a-bitch and I could go and maybe, just maybe, finally be happy. If only I’d had one friend who knew me well enough to know the last God damned thing I’d ever do in this world would be to fling myself off a bridge."

But that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Everybody thinks that the last God damned thing you ever did in this world was to fling yourself off a bridge. It’s painful to realize that they believe you were enough of an idiot to pull a drama queen stunt like that. Even more insulting, that you’d pull a drama queen stunt like that and not leave a long tearful note, full of adolescent angst and a pathetic attempt at bravery, parceling your meager possessions out to the few kids who would actually speak to you.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Heather actually weeps at your funeral! Popular, beautiful Heather, the richest girl in town, whose interactions with you in the seven years you attended the same school consisted almost entirely of breaking into giggles with her girlfriends when you walked past the cafeteria table where she always held court.

Certainly, you think, if there were any justice she’d have been knocked ass over teakettle by the son-of-a-bitch and then picked up and thrown bodily from the bridge instead of you. Never mind that it’s evil to think such thoughts. You’re already dead and stuck in this hellish limbo so what does it matter what you think? Unlike you, Heather deserved it. She of the cutting quip who sheds crocodile tears at your funeral and never noticed you were alive, unless she needed a target for one of her jibes.

Ironic, then, that the day you finally stop the son-of-a-bitch, the life you save is Heather’s. Maybe it isn’t irony at all, maybe it is because you acted to save the one you hated instead of stepping aside and watching her die. You don’t really know.

What you do know is that you happen to be haunting Heather on that particular evening, hovering not five feet away as she is standing on the same bridge in the same spot you stopped at to gaze at the city skyline, and she is crying. You wonder what Heather could possibly have to cry about. You think that this is classic Heather, posed dramatically on the bridge to shed her sorrowful tears against the breathtaking nighttime backdrop of the glowing city.

So perfect is the picture she makes that when you first hear the footsteps you’re sure that they’re made by the feet of a handsome prince, who will undoubtedly sweep Heather into his arms to commence the next fairy-tale chapter in the fairy-tale saga that is the Life of Heather.

This image is so disgusting that you turn away, deciding to haunt rats in the city dump or cockroaches in a trash bin or anything that will be less nauseating than seeing Heather swept into the arms of her next Prince Charming.

Then memory and understanding penetrate the cloud of irritation in your incorporeal brain and you recognize that sound of gravel underfoot. You know it because it is branded into your memory as the last sound the alive version of you ever heard and as you whirl back towards Heather your only thought is "Oh no you don’t!"

Somehow your fingers close on Heather’s sleeve and you yank her to one side just before the son-of-a-bitch hits her. His momentum carries him past Heather and because he plans to hit her with every pound of his not inconsiderable weight he sails right over the railing. Down he soars, like a certain teenage girl did five years ago, screaming the whole way, hitting the water with a loud splat-splash. Isn’t it wonderful?

Or is the wonderful part standing on the bank of the river watching as his ghost - or spirit or whatever you are in that time between death and moving on - wades out of that filthy river, looking so befuddled and terrified?

Or is the wonderful part when the light surrounds him? Not a white light like you see above you but an oozing black un-light that seeps into his nose and ears and mouth as he screams and screams and slowly fades away, becoming one with that hideously wrong light and shrieking through every long second of the process.

Or is the wonderful part going back to your mother’s house and gazing at her sleeping form one last time, silently forgiving her for not loving you enough or not believing in you or letting your picture get dusty as she picked up the reins of life without you? You go up to the attic and rummage until you find Teddy, who slept with you every night of your life, even on the day camp overnights and your trip to Disney World.

With no difficulty, you scoop Teddy into your arms, holding his threadbare body tightly against you and saying to the white light, "Ok, I’m ready now."

The white light brightens to fill the room, and suddenly it is filling you. It doesn’t bring cold agony, like the black light brought the son-of-a-bitch. You throw your head back, the better to inhale it, and Oh God it is so warm and you’re safe, and for the first time you understand love because you’ve become love.

The white light fills you, then it takes you. Isn’t it wonderful?