Zombie Lolita: (A Collection of Short Stories)

by Harmon Cooper

  “Honey, I will always love you,” he said, thinking in the voice of Tomás, the lead protagonist from his soon to be published masterpiece. It was just the start, really. First The New Yorker, then NPR or Oprah’s Book Club, then he’d be debating immigration policy with Bill O’Reilly, or getting comical jabs from Steve Colbert. And that was just the start. Soon he would unveil his magnum opus: Zombie Lolita.

  “Always. Love. Me?” Becky sobbed. “You. Bastard.”

  “Please, don’t talk like that.” He imagined her talking in those little word bubbles from comic books.

  “I. Can’t. Believe. You.”

  “Honey. I. Told. You. If. It. Ever. Came. To. This. I. Might. Leave. You,” he said, in a tone that was both mocking and sincere.

  There was the problem of their son, Quinn, a suspiciously quiet eleven year old named after a character from Asimov’s I, Robot. That and their mortgage, but Stuart was pretty sure the book deal would come and the seven-figure advance alone would pay off the mortgage. Besides, Becky could raise Quinn on her own – they’d always been closer anyhow. Becky, of course, didn’t agree with this plan, but there comes a time in an artist’s life when he or she has to be selfish and for Stuart, that time had finally come.

  As he mailed the permission form the next morning, Stuart thought of Zombie Lolita, the book that would soon make him a household name. In his remake of the classic novel, he’d switch Humbert Humbert for a necrophiliac middle school teacher named Henrietta Henrietta who falls in love with her husband’s first child, a dead boy named Lionel, and their subsequent journey west. For some bizarre reason, everyone loved zombies, especially when they made their way into classic works of literature. Stuart was aware of this, and could feel success looming in the distance, its flesh rotting and its message pedo and cutting edge and guaranteed to make him millions.

  To Stuart, selling out simply meant selling in to a group of people who actually made money from their writings, enough money that he could light the Cuban cigars that he would start smoking with flaming Benjamins. He imagined himself owning piles of the green stuff, which he’d keep taped inside the air conditioning vent in his bedroom or in a briefcase. He wondered how heavy a briefcase full of money would be; he could almost feel adrenaline from carrying such a valuable object in plain sight.

  Maybe he’d start writing a serial about a homicide detective who was investigating people at the same time he was killing them, using a nom de plume of course. Or, maybe he’d join forces with another writer a la James Patterson and co-write airport thrillers. Who said the jump from literary to mainstream fiction wasn’t possible? What was the point of literary fiction anyway? Who really wanted to read about some nobody’s long struggle with existentialism; or some kid getting lost in a city and coming to grips with alienation; or some woman’s difficulty in finding her racial and/or cultural identity?

  Not Stuart. Well, not anymore anyway. Now that he was fastly approaching a world he’d only imagined; now that he was so close to literary fame he could feel his hand aching from signing books – Stuart was ready to do whatever it took to solidify his legacy. Knowing that he needed something that made him distinct, something that separated him from other writers, he decided to give himself a makeover.

  On his way home from mailing his letter of consent to The New Yorker, Stuart stopped in at a local tattoo shop and thirty minutes later, walked out with a sparkling stud in his left nostril. He figured a nose ring would set him apart from other writers, and it would surely look great in a head shot.

  The next logical step would be a change of haircut. Something cutting edge, not quite Korean style, and he didn’t have the right length or consistency for corn rolls, but he could definitely do better than his current hairdo.

  Stuart opted for a faux hawk, not because of its dude-bro underpinnings, but because it defined who he was becoming, someone who towed the line and walked the edge at the same time. A rebel with a cause, a writer with a message, a future literary goliath, a potential Dan Brown meets Salmon Rushdie meets Jamaica Kincaid meets Cormac McCarthy meets Anne Rice meets Michael Crichton meets George R. R. Martin meets Emily Brontë meets F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Stephen King at an exclusive dinner party jointly hosted by George Saunders and J. K. Rowling (using her pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, of course).

  After paying the hairdresser, Stuart Solloway withdrew his savings – nine thousand hard-earned dollars that he’d secretly been stashing away for the last five years as an accountant for Portland’s largest legal firm – and returned home to pack his things and say goodbye to Becky and his son Quinn. He would disappear like Edward Snowden, but do so in his own country, without the NSA on his tail.

  Cash in hand, rolled in a thick wad of hundreds like a drug dealer, Stuart suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of power. With a demented grin on his face, he paraded into the thrift store across the street and purchased a vintage Samsonite briefcase. He took his time thumbing through the cash in front of the store employee, watching as her eyes bulged and her mouth watered. I’ll be back for you, he thought, dropping the crisp bills onto the counter. At the nod of an invisible hat to the cute woman, Stuart placed the rest of the money in the briefcase and returned to his car.

  On his drive home, he thought of what lay ahead. He needed an agent, but figured he could manage his own affairs for the time being. Why go to them when they can come to you? Besides, as soon as his New Yorker piece was published, agents would be bending over backwards to represent him. They’d wait for him like paparazzi, falling from trees, jumping from bushes, or appearing like Oscar the Grouch from trashcans as he walked by. He’d manage his own bidding war, playing the agents off one another and likely being christened the Warren Buffett of the publishing industry after he’d made the cover of Publisher’s Weekly.

  He laughed as he pulled into his driveway, as he looked down at his briefcase brimming with cash. He just needed to grab a few things and begin the long drive to New York. After all, now that he was to be published in The New Yorker, it would help if his bio said he lived in Williamsburg or something.

  Stuart should have figured his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Becky, would complicate things, but he was so lost in his daydreams, that he didn’t anticipate her latching herself onto his leg as soon as he entered the house. He didn’t anticipate her begging and crying and pleading. He didn’t anticipate her setting fire to his car via a piece of cloth in the gas tank as he packed his bags inside their home. He didn’t anticipate the nine thousand dollars in his briefcase going up in flames alongside his only means of transportation.

  After the police showed up and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Becky was arrested and charged with arson, Stuart was left with a shell of a car and a grief-stricken son. Not to worry, he thought, credit cards were made for this very reason. In any event, it would make an interesting narrative, something he could include in his New Yorker bio:

  Stuart Sulloway, a Portland-native who lives in New York City with his son Quinn, is the survivor of an arsonist attack by his pyromaniac ex-wife. His forthcoming novel, Zombie Lolita, will be followed by a collection of short stories entitled, The Dreams of Stuart Sulloway: An Exploration of Genius and Chance.

  Quickly realizing what he must do, Stuart bought two Greyhound tickets that night for New York, and the next morning, he was off alongside his fretful son, Quinn, to The Big Apple. The trip was long and arduous – as any start to an epic journey should be –and highlights of the three day bus ride include sharting Barney, a retired truck driver sitting in front of them who constantly ate tamales and pork rinds; Stella, a former Vegas waitress with tattooed eyeliner, crocodile skin and a lip ring (she kept saying something about Stuart’s nose ring, but he couldn’t tell if it was a compliment or not); and Enrique, a Columbian man fond of snoring and speaking Spanish in his sleep and hissing like a boa constrictor when he was awake.

  It was in New York that Stuart realized he’d made a horrible mistake: in a hurry to catch the bus, he’d left his laptop s
itting on the dining room table in Portland. Luckily, this was also what credit cards were for. After several attempts to make purchases using his cards (all of which were swiftly declined), Stuart called the credit card company, and discovered that Becky had maxed out both their cards paying her bail. She’d also canceled their shared debit card.

  Stuart had to pull himself together. With the remaining cash he had on hand – eighty dollars plus his son Quinn’s emergency twenty – Stuart found a hotel room in Spanish Harlem. The two bunkered down for the night with a couple bags of potato chips and two king-sized Snickers bars.

  Unable to sleep, Stuart obsessed over the only option that remained: he would arrive early at The New Yorker offices with his print-out of the e-mail from Kassim Keshi, and like any good interim editor, Kassim would give him an advance on the money he was owed for his piece. After he’d received the money, he would fly back to Portland to claim his laptop and subsequently Zombie Lolita, which he failed to back-up. His only hope was that Becky hadn’t destroyed it in a fit of rage.

  Becky had indeed destroyed Stuart’s laptop in a fit of rage, thus deleting his rough draft of Zombie Lolita and all the short stories he’d written over the last year. Before the cathartic cleansing, Becky had searched through Stuart’s inbox until she found the e-mail from The New Yorker. Needing someone to vent to, she placed a call to the fabled magazine. An intern named Terry picked up, and after she’d calmed down, Terry explained to Becky that the e-mail her soon-to-be-ex-husband had received was actually part of a Nigerian scam.

  With this in mind, Becky drove the hammer down onto the laptop keyboard, deep into its mechanical guts. Of course, there was no way Stuart could have known this at the time.

  After arriving at The New Yorker offices the following morning, Stuart quickly realized he’d made an even bigger mistake than leaving his laptop in Portland. As the intern Terry explained to him he should have questioned the spurious e-mail and that he had been duped by a Nigerian scam artist; as Terry explained that The New Yorker accepts .001% of short story submissions and that he had a better chance of jumping through a flaming Cheerio into a pool of Kanye West sexbots than getting published in the magazine; as Terry explained to him that his wife had called and boy, was she angry; as Terry pat him on the shoulder and complimented his nose ring – all Stuart could think about was Zombie Lolita.

  And he said this to Terry the intern, Zombie Lolita, he kept mumbling, and Terry told him quite frankly that that was the stupidest idea for a novel he’d ever heard. And of course Stuart lashed out at him for this. He stood, grabbed the fake tree in the reception area, and hurled it at the snobby bearded intern.

  Security came faster than a room full of virgins and soon, Stuart was lying on a concrete sidewalk outside the magazine’s offices, bruised, sobbing and cursing the sky as a pair of stray dogs sniffed at his ankles. Zombie Lolita, he thought, as he took the bus back to the hotel. Zombie Lolita, he thought as he made check-out time with Quinn. Zombie Lolita, he thought as he called Becky to apologize.

  The acceptance letter was still pinned to Stuart’s refrigerator in his tiny, one bedroom apartment. It was a constant reminder of the lengths a man would go once he thought his dreams had been realized.

  The Updated Elder’s Pocket Companion*

  * The original Elder’s Pocket Companion was written in 1844 by William Smith, brother of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons). The original document outlines the Mormon Church’s delusional stance on marrying ghosts, also known as a spiritual wedding. If you don’t believe me, the little known document can be found here. (For spiritual wifery, start on page three.) For more on spiritual wifery, refer to our mutual friend, Wikipedia. Now enjoy the update on the following page!

  Being

  A treaty regarding the expansion of the dead into our lives & the expansion of our lives into the lives of the dead, notes on spectral STDs & safe sex practices with the dead, various types of female ghosts to avoid, policies on homosexual apparitional unions, updated church doctrine, advice for first time ghost daters, &c, to follow.

  Also,

  The authority of the Priesthood, specifically regarding the hair pie penetrating abilities of the Elders, Priests, Sheiks, Rabbis, Deacons, Teachers, select Imams, fabled Lamas, Popes, Gurus, &c, lie in the bosom of the six Founders, all of whom will maintain their benevolent monopoly on ghost sex, & its various forms including but not limited to: spiritual wifery, apparitional coitus, manuals on spectral orgasms, departed houghmagandy, posthumous marriage, & other forms of fornication along the carnal-spiritual spectrum.

  May the flaming thunderbolt of wisdom continue to knight those who thirst for the truth & bless those who seek liberation from ghastly tribulations! May the flaming thunderbolt of wisdom continue to spray into the eyes of the naysayers! Money shots! May the flaming thunderbolt of wisdom continue to find shelter in nature’s tufted treasure!

  “A wise man seeketh after knowledge, findeth it, manipulateth it, rewriteth it to better fit his target audience, tweeteth it, punisheth those who disagree with it, tricketh those too dimwitted to question it, repeateth it.”

  --Source unknown

  Attention Brethren Gathering,

  Newsletter time! Updates to come but first let me say, dear fellows, that the weather is wonderful despite the complications due to the rise in sin & illicitry in our most holiest of lands & most holiest of times & most holiest of circumstances & most holiest of holies &c. TV dinners galore! The microwave of our mixed heritages is stinging less than we anticipated & a new wave of deaths will increase our flock & better our prospects. Fear not those prone to spite & bitterness. Remain positive & optimistic. I say to you the time is indeed now! Now, I sayeth! Now! Or, if you are busy now, tomorrow!

  Apologies are due, & the Elders would like you – our most beloved readers, followers, & peers – to know that we are truly & deeply sorry that it has been over 150 years (!) since our last publication. A horrible miscalculation! As one can imagine, salacious spectral occurrences have gone through a considerable number of changes since our last newsletter, & these will be addressed in the following weeks & months.

  Now, I confess to know some things the world does not. The world needn’t know the truth, as the truth is worse than the tightest of earthly shackles. I, Jebediah M. Grant – Jebi to my friends, Herr Docktor Grant to my underlings, Diah to my enemies – have penetrated a number of ghosts; have liberated a number of spirits on their way to the fiery bowels of the most harrowing of hells; have provided countless liberating experiences with my own personal flaming thunderbolt of wisdom. Thusly, I, & a number of my colleagues, are nearing the completion of a brief step-by-step guide for spectral introductions, sexual practices, pregnancies (never abort a ghost baby unless you must!), & general guidance for our members old & new to be published later this fall.

  In the meantime, enjoy & pay great heed to the Five Points below. These points will be expounded upon in our upcoming publication, as they should be!

  1. Resources for Finding a Ghost

  Finding, dating, & possibly marrying a ghost can be just as complicated as finding, dating, & eventually marrying a living entity. Websites abound; new ones everyday dilute the information highway & it is dire indeed! The probationary state of fledging websites stirreth animosity in my loins & shrinketh my rock python. There is no Tinder for ghost dating, but have no fear, dear fellows, your church is here!

  A forthcoming volume will contain all church approved websites. For now, we champion & encourage browsing on Spiritualwifery.org, Spectersex.eu, Ghosthookups.com & its spiritual sister-site, GhostHarmony.info. It saddens me to the very core to report that MissedHauntings.com is no longer in our good graces due to a botched match-up leading to the death of one of our most prolific Elders. The tragedy knows no bounds! Paul Bundlesworth Smith, you will always be with us in union & pleasure.

  2. Your First Date with a Ghost

  The time for small talk is now.
When first being introduced to a female ghost, either by one of the Elders of our church, an affiliated member, or on your own accord – eye contact is a must! Those who forego eye contact push themselves one step closer to a bad union. The debauched union between a human & a ghost is deadly! The Elders recommend taking the following five precautions during the initial dating periods:

  a.) The aforementioned eye contact.

  b.) A gift of chocolate less than six months old. In our experience, ghosts feel disrespected when given gifts, especially chocolate, that is older than six months. They may be dead, but they still have feelings! Lechercraft begins with a gift from & of the heart. Your flaming thunderbolt of wisdom will be on its way to the tunnel under the hill with each bite of truffle. Check the date, dear fellows!

  c.) Light grazing of the hand. To be used inconspicuously at first & deliberately later. Getting the ghost in the mood for amorous congress is the first step in breeding with those depraved of life. Do not underestimate the power of the soothing touch of a mortal. With more ghosts becoming tangible day by day, the time to grope is now.

  d.) Know when to say yes. Female ghosts are known to be shy & quiet. Confidence must be maintained at all times if the desire for supernatural copulation is to be adequately quenched, & be quenched it must! The ghost, however prudish she may seem, is already expressing interest in you simply by meeting. The reigns of the chariot must be wielded by you, a man confident in the infinite wisdom of the fabled Elders & other church associates, &c.

  e.) Keep other options available. While it is important to let your ghost know you are there exclusively for her, you should also be there exclusively for other haunts that may float along. Commitment to one ghost, especially during the initial dating period, is to be avoided. You needn’t be a flesh monger, but you should always be shopping around, even in a committed relationship with a specter. Remember the Elder’s motto: One ghost is good but two is better; three is glee but no more than four.