Random stories

I lost my body to a zombie on my twentieth birthday.

It wasn’t much of a body in the first place, so don’t feel bad for me. I sure didn’t. My ears stuck out sideways like the handles on a great cooking pot. I had a voluptuous figure, in the words of my best (only) friend, but even she meant fat. Or if not fat, podgy. And then there was the birthmark on my right cheek that looked like a child’s palm, as if they’d dipped it in purple paint and then pressed it against my head. That hadn’t done me any favours at school.

No, it wasn’t much of a body, so giving it up to a new tenant came extremely easily.

The new tenant... The zombie that took control of my body…

When you become a zombie, you don’t quite die. If you did, it would be easier — let me tell you that. Instead, your soul (your self?) peels away from your body like sticky tape froom a package. But you’re not fully released, no matter how much you want to be. Instead, you’re tethered to it still, tied like a kite, gusting around just behind and above it, only observing. Or if not a kite, like a rotting tooth dangling over the gum on its final string.

Before I became a ghost or a zombie or whatever you want to call it, I was very much into gardening. When I gardened, I’d listen to jazz — don’t ask me why. To Charlie Parker or to John Coltrane on my headphones, the warm sax like a shield for my body, but against what was inside me, not the outside, as strange as that sounds. An internal shield of languorous melody.

From seventeen to twenty, I lived with my best friend in a tiny home in a tough neighbourhood. I didn’t have family. It wasn’t that they were dead but that we’d fallen out when I was sixteen. So I moved in with my best friend as soon as possible. We had a tiny garden: a square of grass with a border around it and a high wooden fence around that. To me, that garden was everything. I’d prune bad leaves and spray away the blight once in the morning then again as the sun set. I’d tend to the lavender and roses as if they were delicate bonsai trees.

This is how I lived for those three years: I worked, I studied, I gardened, and most importantly, I dreamed. I dreamed of a bigger garden — a real English cottage garden, with apple trees and blueberry bushes and grass soft enough to lie on. I dreamed of a family — not the family I’d been given, but a family I’d chosen. I dreamed of our garden alive with laughter and the scents of mint and rosemary and the smoke of a blazing barbecue wafting into the sky.

Her name — my friend — was Lucy. It was breast cancer that took her, not zombies.

As she died, the little garden wilted with her. I spent my time trying to look after her, to keep her spirits up. We’d watch bad movies and play board-games when she had the energy. We’d talk about the future, but rarely of the past.

She moved back in with her parents when things got very bad.

And then she was gone, and I was alone.

I spent the next two months trying to get my life, that I’d postponed whilst caring for Lucy, back on track. I began tending to my garden, staring at textbooks, working extra shifts to distract myself and to afford the rent.

Then one day the zombie got me.

It’s hard to say how, exactly. Just that one day I was out in my tiny garden, spraying the roses and getting them ready for summer, when the bottle fell from my hand. Not that I dropped it. My hand just… let go.

I floated up above myself, tethered, breezing like a leaf. Not scared — not anything.

I watched the intruder, the new person, slip inside my shell. She took off the gloves, lay them on the ground, then fell asleep on the grass.

​

The zombie didn’t care so much for hygiene. Certainly, she didn’t care for work or studying or gardening. I heard her try jazz once, Coltrane, but after a few bars she turned him off, her face grimacing as is she were a vampire and had gotten the taste of garlic in her mouth.

I watched, helpless, as the zombie lost me my job. I wanted to scream at her to do better! That it‘d been hard getting to this point in my life and now she was ruining it all. But I couldn’t. My voice was silent no matter how hard I tried to scream. Perhaps it was because I didn’t truly care. After all, I was dead now. Or as good as. I was just waiting for the body to catch up

​

It was six months later, as the bills were piling and my savings waning (goodbye cottage garden), that the cat began visiting. We’d watch it sometimes from out the window, me and the zombie. The garden, at this point, had become a ghost itself; it was a nest of weeds and leaves and mud. The rose was dead and only the hardier plants were still kicking.

The tabby rolled in the weeds for a while as we stared at it from the kitchen. Then it pounced twice at some unseen, and probably unreal, pray. What did an animal so full of vitality want in a place full of death? Eventually, the cat jumped over the fence and we were alone again.

We called it Lavender, because each time it came to visit it would chew on our lavender. As such, it seemed like the right name — and this was a decision both me and the zombie came to independently. So it must have been a good name.

I began to talk to the zombie about Lavender. I wasn’t sure it was listening, but I kept on talking all the same. I suggested that we could leave it a little of the tuna. A bowl of water. It didn’t have a collar and it was a skinny little thing. It could do with the food.

When the zombie walked out to put down the bowl of water, Lavender ran up to it and nudged against its leg.

Like the reverse of a genie escaping its lamp, I was pulled back down into that shell of a body. It didn’t last long — only long enough for me to stroke the cat before as it ate the food, then it vanished again. Five minutes, altogether. And once it was gone, the plug was pulled from my body and like dirty water spiralling down a sink, I was washed back out.

The next day when the cat visited, I took control for six minutes. Then seven, eight, nine. Somedays, I was in control even before the cat came. On those days I tended to the garden a little. Dug up the dead plants. Replaced them with thyme and rosemary. Scented plants. Healing plants.

After a month of this, I’d gained enough control every day to get a few chores done. To force my body to shower, to wash our clothes, iron, to search for new jobs and circle them in the paper.

When we got a job in a fast food place, the zombie went in. I still didn’t have control at all hours.

One day, I made the decision to book therapy. To finally tell someone about the zombie and the cat and my parents and my best friend, and everything else that I’d bottled up and was drowning internally inside of. I‘d been crying into myself all this time — silently, not even realising it. Weeping into this corked bottle, a dark balloon of depression growing and stretching inside me.

I started therapy three months ago.

The zombie is still here, sometimes. But it has fewer hours than I do. Maybe only a handful a week.

The little garden is growing again. Threatening to bloom even more beautifully than before.

And the cat visits for longer lengths of time now. Somedays it creeps inside after me, and jumps on my lap. It sits there warm and content, its body purring, and in those moments I can’t think of a single problem at all.

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Submitted by Rupertfroggington on Mon, Apr 25, 2022 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

You were one of the first to fall after the zombie apocalypse broke out, only to discover ghosts can't move on while their corpses are still cursed. You and other spirits bound to earth can't help but tot follow your shambling monster selves around and watch all the dumb zombie stuff it does.