Zombie Versus Fairy Featuring Albinos

by James Marshall

  Once we’re both inside Fairy_26’s apartment, she closes the door, locks it, and leans back against it, smiling at me. “We made it,” she says. Her hands are flat against the door.

  I groan in agreement.

  “Why don’t you wait for me in the living room? I’m going to take a quick shower.” Still beaming at me, she unbuttons her drugstore uniform top. She takes it off right in front of me. I stare at her small, perky, warm, and alive breasts. When she turns and hangs the garment up in the open closet next to the front door, I stare at her little wings and where they emerge from her wound-free back. They sprout lightly from between her shoulder blades, which jut out in a strong and angular way in comparison.

  I turn away, uncomfortable. Somehow her wings and where they meet her skin are more intimate than her breasts. I stumble toward the living room.

  “Turn on some music if you want,” she calls after me.

  I don’t know if this world is bigger than mine, if we shrank, or if it’s a bit of both. The carpet is spongy green moss. The walls are flowers: two walls are covered with white daisies; one wall is covered with red daisies. Every other exposed surface is warm brown wood; it has a fresh cut smell but I know it hasn’t been cut; it’s still alive. Like Fairy_26.

  If I turn back right now, I know I’ll see her take off the rest of her clothes. It’s cruel. Is she doing this intentionally? To hurt me? To rub what she has—life, warmth, ease, and flexibility—in my face? Or is she just so completely unaware of what it means to me?

  Whether she knows it or not, there’s a stark element of viciousness to this: her beauty and how liberal she is with it. On the other hand, if she were conservative and shy, she’d probably just inflame, frustrate, and maybe even infuriate me. There’s no winning with her. And me. I’ve never spent much time thinking about how beautiful supernatural creatures should act. It must be impossible. If you come right out and say, “Look I just want to be your friend,” you seem egotistical and presumptuous but if you don’t lay out the ground-rules, you might wind up leading someone on. Maybe beautiful supernatural creatures don’t have it as easy as I assumed.

  I don’t turn on any music. I just fall onto her sofa and wait for her. The sofa is dark brown wood that flows out from the walls so fluidly it seems more like a thing of water. Its cushions are thick. They’re the same spongy green moss that covers the floor. The light is bright. It pours in through an apartment-wide, floor-to-ceiling window. The whole apartment is cut off on one side. It’s not a cross-sectional cut. It’s right at the edge. The wall that looks like it should be there isn’t but the apartment is so comfortable it doesn’t feel like anything is missing. The apartment just ends and the sky begins. The sunlight flooding into the side of the tree, into the side of me, into the room where I am, sitting on soft moss that smells of freshness and life, everything I’m not, while waiting for a fairy to shower, is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It’s not the perfection of its brightness: it’s neither glaring nor dim. It’s not the perfection of its temperature: it’s neither too warm nor too cool. It’s the perfection of it. It’s impossible. Yet I see it and feel it and know it can’t be but I don’t care. Can light be happy? I think this light is happy. It’s not burning unimaginably in the cold dark of space and sometimes reaching out, with a flare, for something it can never touch.

  I feel worse than I did before. Even though I want to be here and, if the word makes any sense coming from me, I think I’m “glad” to be here, because someone who’s so everything-I-want-to-be has seen me and reacted with something other than unmistakable visceral revulsion . . . but how can a starving man, left alone with a feast, not want a bite?

  I can hear the water running in the shower. She’s singing a song I don’t know. I’m trying to not to think of her warm smooth body moving under a spray of clear-but-strangely-white water. I’m trying not to think of her doing what I tried to do yesterday when I took a shower: getting clean. I’m trying not to imagine this:

  I get up. I stagger, slowly, toward the bathroom door. With my deformed-by-death hand, I try the smooth wooden doorknob. I do it as quietly as I can. It’s unlocked. I open the door. Steam enshrouds me, ghosting out into the cool behind me. I see her through the shower curtain of hanging and dripping weeping willow branches but she doesn’t see me. She’s lit by the bright sky pouring through the skylight. I look at her slender naked body. If I had a normal heart, it’d beat faster, harder. If I had regular blood, it’d course. It’d surge. If I could breathe like a human being, I couldn’t breathe. I stumble toward the dangling willow branches. I yank them to the side. She screams. What good does screaming do? She slips, falls, gets up, backs up, away from me, slapping at my arms, which are always reaching out and which now reach out for her. The water hits me but I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything but my cold hunger-lust. She’s shaking her head from side to side crazily, screaming and screaming. I grab her and yank her close to me. With my mouth wide-open and my jagged broken teeth shining, I bite and tear a chunk of flesh from her neck. Blood spurts from her in a rhythmically pulsing geyser of red juice. The scream changes. It becomes a thing of pain and knowing, rather than of fear and wonder. I try to drag her from the shower but I lose my grip on her and she falls. On the mossy floor, she kicks her legs insanely. She tries in vain to staunch the colour squirting from her neck. In the shower water pooling on the green moss, her blood tries to fashion a pink outfit to cover her nakedness but it fails and swirls, reluctantly, down the tree drain. I consume her. I eat all the lovely healthy youthful parts of her. I do it so I can remain. So I can stay. Undead. I won’t make her like me. She won’t become a zombie. There won’t be enough of her left when I’m done. It’s a mercy to repay her kindness. Besides, I’m so hungry. I don’t take pleasure in devouring her. I need to do it; I must. I don’t do it because I want to do it; I hate it. I’m forced, through a biological imperative, to do all this, to sustain my miserable life, to prolong the monotony: the toil, the routine, the hassle. The strain. I do it because this is what everyone expects from me. I do it because this is what I have to do to be considered normal. My wife says, “Everyone has to do things they don’t want to do, Buck.”

  And that’s exactly why I don’t do it. Because I have to. I need to. But I refuse. I won’t be my hunger. I won’t do what zombies say I should do. I’m still sitting on the couch. Fairy_26 is still, safely, in the shower. While I wait for her to finish, I make a telepathic call to my wife. She’s probably worried.

  “Buck? Where are you? You’re late. You said you’d take me to get groceries, remember? What’d the doctor say?”

  I never know where to start with my wife. That’s part of the problem. We’re always in the middle of something. Nothing ever starts or stops. It’s always the middle.

  “The doctor said I’m depressed, Chi.”

  “Depressed? What do you have to be depressed about? You have everything anyone could possibly want. You have a great job; you have a great house; you have a wife who loves you . . . wait. Is that it? Are you depressed because of me? Should we go to counselling? Barry and Deepah are going to counselling. Deepah says it’s done wonders for them. She says they’re like teenagers again. Are you coming home now? You said you’d take me to get groceries, remember?”

  “I remember. I’ll take you to get groceries. I’m just going to be a little late.”

  “Why? What’s wrong? What’s going on, Buck? Are you okay?”

  “No I’m not okay, Chi. I’m depressed.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. I just found out I’m depressed.”

  “Damn it. I should’ve gone to the doctor with you. I knew I should’ve gone to the doctor with you. Didn’t I tell you? There are all these things going on and I’m just finding out now. It’s so. Damn it. Why don’t you talk to me, Buck? You never tell me anything. Sometimes I feel like we’re strangers. I think we should go to counselling like Barry and Dee
pah. I really do.”

  “The idea of going to counselling depresses the hell out of me,” I say.

  “We really need groceries, Buck. There’s nobody in the house to eat. And we’re just about out of saliva. You know what I’m like when I don’t have saliva for my morning coffee. I don’t think either of us wants to go through another scene like that.”

  “If I have to go to counselling, I’ll throw myself into some kind of really big grinder.”

  “A grinder, Buck? Really? Where are you going to find a big grinder? It sounds to me like you just don’t want to go to counselling and you’re using your depression as an excuse. What’d the doctor say you should do?”

  “He gave me a prescription.”

  “A prescription? Oh God, Buck. A prescription makes it seem so much more real. Now I’m worried. I need a prescription, too. The fact that you’re depressed and I love you so much and I try so hard to make you happy just makes me want to cry. I don’t know what to do, Buck. I really don’t. What’d you have for lunch?”

  “I got an arm from the vending machine,” I lie.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  Neither do I, but I say, “I’ll be home in a little while and we’ll go get groceries.”

  I end the telepathic call. If my wife wasn’t already dead, I’d probably kill her. That’s what I realize after I talk to her. I don’t know why I stay with her. She loves me. I know that. I love her too, but I also hate her. I don’t know if I love her more than I hate her or if I hate her more than I love her. I just know I hate her. When I say “I love you” to my wife when we go to bed at night or when I leave for work in the morning, I’m telling the truth. But I don’t say, “I also hate you. Possibly as much as I love you. Perhaps even more.” When I say “I love you” I’m telling the truth, just not the whole truth. So help me, God, okay?

  Zombies believe God is a supernatural creature. If God weren’t a supernatural creature, so the zombie thinking goes, God would help us lay waste to supernatural creatures and infect the living people they protect but God won’t. However, God doesn’t seem to really help supernatural creatures and the living people they protect too much, either. Sure, supernatural creatures have all kinds of amazing magic powers, and, yes, living people get to die, which is nice, but living people suffer terribly pretty much the whole time they’re alive. Zombie philosophers argue that the pain—spiritual, physical, or both—that living people experience while alive only makes the good feeling of death feel even better later. Otherwise, God would be a real jerk. The zombie philosophers aren’t too sure why God set up the world like this in the first place but they’re sure God has a good reason. Most of them. Pretty sure.

  I hear Fairy_26 turn off the shower. I imagine her stepping out, grabbing a warm fluffy towel, and drying herself just as I imagined killing her and eating her. In my mind, there’s no difference. Does she dry her wings with a towel? Or does she air-dry them by fluttering them? She probably uses a towel. Otherwise she’d get water all over the bathroom. I don’t know for sure. I can’t ask.

  In the corner of my sightless white eyes, I see her. Stiffly, I turn toward her. She’s standing in the hall, holding a white towel in front of herself. It loosely hangs down from where she holds it with one flat hand over her breasts. “Everything okay in here?” she asks. Her wings open and close, slowly, like a butterfly warming itself on a branch in the sun. Her green hair is dark and heavy with wetness. It’s gathered in wavy clumps.

  I groan.

  “I’m just going to get dressed. I’ll be right out.”

  I try to nod. It doesn’t really work. She turns to go before I can decide whether or not to look, so I look and I see her perfect bare backside. Then, unsure whether I’m glad I did or sad I did, I turn and stare off into the distance, in my mind separating her and her world from me and mine. It’s an unbridgeable expanse. No one even thinks of trying. It’s the one certainty in this game of chance: everyone loses. What the hell am I doing here? I have a zombie wife. I have to take her to buy zombie groceries. I start getting up.

  That’s when Fairy_26, barefoot, comes dancing out of her bedroom wearing a short baby-blue backless dress from which her wings spring and spread and suddenly begin to flap in a blur when she sees me struggling to get up. Her naked feet lift off the floor. She flies to me. She hovers in front of me, holding out her small and alive hands with a look of concern on her sweet face in front of which strands of damp green hair hang. She takes my outstretched hands, gnarled like tree roots, in her soft flexible ones, supple like newborn leaves. Her beating-near-the-point-of-invisibility wings flap even faster as she flies backwards, pulling on me, helping me off the sofa. I almost think I feel what it’s like to be alive again, through her, through touching her, or more precisely, through her willingness, no, her eagerness to touch me, but it passes as soon as I recognize I’m just feeling something, anything other than the numbness, the sadness, and the dead-heart racing despair of being who and what I am, and who and what I wish I wasn’t. When I’m standing upright, Fairy_26, still hovering, still holding my twisted hands, says, “Okay?”

  I grunt.

  She pouts. “Do you have to leave now?”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  The Illusion Of Differencer

  I shake my head to say, “No.” I forget all about leaving Fairy_26’s tree branch apartment as soon as she helps me up. I fall back onto the mossy cushions of the sofa like I’d only stood up because a lady had entered the room and I’m polite.

  Hovering before me, Fairy_26’s wings slow. She descends and lands lightly. As she stands there, looking at me, trying to figure me out, her wings open and close, wide open and tightly together, in slow, peaceful way that looks like it feels incredibly satisfying, like a good stretch when you’re human and you wake up first thing in the morning, completely rested from a good night’s sleep and you’re so alive you feel like you could do anything even though you couldn’t. She catches me staring at her wings.

  “I know,” she says. “They’re strong for such fragile-looking things.”

  Neither of us says anything for a long time after she says that and I wonder if we’re both thinking about living people, about being living people, about being strong and looking fragile, about being fragile and looking strong, about the two of us meeting under different circumstances, less complicated ones, or if it’s just me.

  “You might be the perfect man,” sighs Fairy_26. “You listen and don’t say anything.” She brushes at something invisible on the front of her dress, on the façade, the lie. “Sorry again about that scene in the store. It’s my fault. I should’ve known better than to get involved with an elf. At first, it’s all singing and dancing in the forest and everything is wonderful and then you catch him getting it on with some bitch by a stream. I hate naiads. They’re sluts. I shouldn’t say they’re all sluts. Most of them are sluts. They’re usually gorgeous but this one wasn’t even that beautiful. I don’t know what he was thinking. I guess he wasn’t. Men.” She harrumphs. Then she remembers me and says, “Sorry. I didn’t mean you.”

  I point at my head and move my hand away quickly, like I don’t think either and she laughs. It makes me so happy: seeing all these things happening quickly, her calm ocean blue eyes widen and her pretty mouth open a little and turn up at the sides, exposing her perfect teeth and her pink tongue, and watching her body shake with glee. Only a fairy can feel glee. I’m convinced of it when I see her laugh. When she laughs, she laughs completely. Even her wings laugh. They shake with her body. After a time that passes too quickly, Fairy_26 settles down. She smiles at me for a while. Then she looks away. Something heavy and hard inside me falls and thuds.

  “Usually I go for giants,” she says, sitting on the mossy floor about five feet in front of me. “Before the elf, my last two boyfriends were giants. I like the brooding type, I guess.” She’s sitting on her left hip. Her left hand is flat on
the natural carpet beside her, supporting the light weight of her upper body. Her slender legs are together. Her knees are bent. “Generally, giants have depressive personalities. Like you,” she says, glancing at me. “Depressive personalities, not depressing,” she adds, peeking at me. She laughs again. The laugh turns into a smile. The smile slowly fades. She frowns. “Giants don’t like the way they are, either. They wish they were normal-sized. They’re loners. I like loners: people who don’t fit. It’s probably because I don’t feel like I fit, either. Maybe nobody does. I don’t know. I don’t think it matters.” She rubs her right calf and I don’t think of all the things I’d do to experience what those fingers feel because I know it’d take several especially long eternities. “I used to sit in a giant boyfriend’s ear and talk to him.” With the same hand she used to touch her leg, she finger-combs her a freshly fallen clump of damp green hair behind her ear. The sunlight turns her hair into millions of different shades. It’s brighter in some places and darker in others. Where the sun puts its shape-shifting hands on her directly, it looks almost white. Fairy_26 touches her ear. “Not right inside his auditory canal. That’d probably tickle. I’d lay on the fleshy ledge just beneath it.” She shows me, smoothing her finger over that orangey-pink indented part of herself, just above her earlobe. Then she pulls her hand away. “He’d wander the countryside. I’d talk. His name was Troublemaker but he wasn’t a troublemaker at all. He was big, though. Talk about a tricky love life. Boy. I tell you.”

  She lapses into silence then, leaving me to think about it. To imagine it. Are giants sized proportionally?

  “I think that’s why I usually go for giants,” says Fairy_26. “Because they’re sad.” She plays with the hem of her baby-blue dress, staring at it. “I like to make people happy. I don’t know if I ever do but I like to try.” Without looking at me, she shrugs. When she does, the spaghetti strap on the right side of her dress slides off her right shoulder and falls against her right arm. Desperately, I try to communicate with her telepathically but in an anonymous way so she doesn’t know it’s me, to ask her to leave it there, but she hooks it up with her thumb and lifts it back into place. “Maybe it’s because I think if I make someone else happy, I’ll be happy then, too, because I’m really not happy but I think I’m happy enough. I told you I cry and cry sometimes but I don’t feel sad all the time. Really. I swear.” Tucking both legs beneath herself, sitting on her heels, she holds up her hand, swearing to me. Then she lowers it. “Anyway, I still miss Troublemaker sometimes.”