Forsaken Me

It's wrong to pick favourites, but this zombie-tale is one of my favourite-favourite things I've ever written. Homophobia, rituals, and life-after-death? Slay.

The chanting was a tad aggravating, as was the incense. I’ve never liked sandalwood. There was a clattering in my groin. I didn’t like that either. 

I opened my eyes to see Lindsay Baker, of all people, standing over me, wearing a robe that had seen better days, holding what the eBay seller had probably described as an ancient tome. She was intoning some spooky drivel. My body felt bizarre, like there was a cat sitting on my neck, but also like a part of me was missing. When I craned my head forward, I saw something was: there was a large hole in me where my ribs had been. I never had any particular relationship with my ribs, but to feel abandoned by them in this hour of need was quite depressing. 

“Lindsay, what the actual fuckette?”

We hadn’t seen each other since our last year of high school, when she’d sloppily tried to assault me on the dancefloor and I’d neatly sidestepped her advances, leading her to collide with a table adorned with bowls of fruit punch. We’d been broken up for a few weeks at that point. Her hair was the same; lank and brunette and pointless. 

“Calm down, dollface, I’m just finishing the binding spell, or you’re going to float away into the atmosphere or the astral plane…”

She continued chanting. It made my head ache. Ache upon ache. Organs crying out with shock. There was another odour under all of the incense, like someone had left meat out to spoil. I thought about what I’d been doing before I’d gone to sleep. Cam had been telling me he loved me and that he’d been having some thoughts about the future. I’d felt for the ring in my pocket, looked briefly down at it. When I’d looked up, he was shouting, we had sped towards – oh. 

And now I’m slow and rotting.

When she got me up, I was perhaps unsurprisingly a little unsteady on my feet. She led me over to a makeshift altar, covered in glossy framed pictures of us from high school – her all fizzy and toothsome, me broad-shouldered and miserably closeted. In the mirror hung on the wall above, I looked at myself, years on, days after. My cheeks were hollowed, my follicles stringy. There were strange markings on my skin, craters like coffee stains. I had never seen someone with blue lips before. I had never seen a dead body before. And now I was the corpse bride.

I promptly vomited. Formaldehyde. A few eight-legged creatures, all wet and foul. Something segmented and moon-coloured. The little beasts danced with shiny teeth. Lindsay recoiled, then composed herself all smugly, like she was somehow special for raising the dead. People do that all the time, don’t they? Or maybe they don’t.

Her hands reached round my shoulders, to caress me. I shuddered. One of the spiders I’d coughed up was wiggling, trying to right itself in the sticky mass on the floor. Lindsay’s hands wandered further south. It reminded me of high school. I hated high school. I hated how she touched me. I hated what she made me do. I closed my eyes, met her grip, and pulled.

You know how when you shut your eyes real tight, everything seems really bright and really strange, as soon as you return to the world? When I opened my vision to God, Lindsay was all red and blue. She was gaping at me, at herself, at her severed, spurting, separated arm in my hand. I dropped it. “I’m gay, Lindsay. Stop trying to hate crime me.” 

I stepped over her as she fell, convulsing, screaming bloody murder as she rolled around on the ground. “Oh, stop being so melodramatic. It’s just an arm.” I couldn’t handle how loud she was being. The world felt heightened, unpleasantly tuned up. I felt something wriggling in my ears. I needed to find some clothes and get away from her trademark bad Lindsay energy. I needed to find Cam. 

I headed up and out. On the street, strange creatures were zithering around, barking with lights and noise – wait, no. Cars and trucks. They are called vehicles. I felt smarted and wronged. I hadn’t asked to die. And now these cruel devices were trying to hurt me again.

I winced and waved a hand as I crossed the road and one of the car-creatures yelled at me. I groaned a groany-kind-of-groan and pushed the Volvo-monster with my hand and watched it whirl away from me, hit the air and then the ground. Someone yelled and then quickly fell silent. A snowflake pirouetted down from the firmament and kissed my tongue. I kept moving. It’s not my fault I’m strong and hunky and powerful, even in death.

When I broke up with her, she threw a plate at my shoulder and told me that my mother deserved to die. When I got together with Cam and went social media official, posting a picture of us making out by a waterfall a short drive from Vancouver, she sent me a small cardboard box of ants in the mail. I pictured her hands sealing the box awkwardly, trying to push each escaping insect back with her fingers.

I looked down and realised that I was still holding Lindsay’s arm. A responsible citizen, I dropped it into a municipal bin. Its fingers writhed amidst the chewing gum and the wet newspaper, as if it was still connected to its annoying former owner. Ew. Someone crossed the road a few metres down to get away from me. Fair. My jaw was twirling oddly off my skull, I could feel it, as if it was trying to kiss the breeze. 

When I first started going out with Lindsay, there was no narrative for our kind of dysfunction so I assumed it was just a new kind of functioning. My parents were radiantly happy that I was sleeping with a woman, actively shining with a kind of joy. My mum was dealing with breast cancer at the time, a lobular ball of rude, rude cells, and me embracing hetero-wonder was enough to make her feel briefly better. My father was just glad I wasn’t a faggot (years later, he did not attend mine and Cam’s anniversary parties). Lindsay made me little flower crowns and corsages and mix-tapes and watercolour paintings of my ass-crack and covered my locker at school in pink post-it notes that said lover and told everyone in the entire community, our small and precious town, that I was a wonder in the bedroom. It was like drowning. 

Ants crawled on the paving stones now. I walked through the neighbourhood, the stars above howling that I did not belong in this plane, above the soil. Rude. Homophobic, even. So much for Happy Pride. Wait, was it still the summer? The air was crisp. How long had I been rotting? How long does it take a body to decompose? Had Lindsay even bothered trying to restore my flesh to my bones with her foul magic? 

And then there it was: my bones had led me here. Home. Our little cul-de-sac, the hug of the houses, the mock-Tudor vibes. When we moved in, I carried Cam across the threshold and fell to my knees, too weak for that kind of show of affection. Then we kissed.

Now? One of my lips fell off. I saw it on the ground and sighed. I stepped forward. 

I didn’t get far. Lindsay grabbed onto me with her good, intact arm. She had followed me the ten minutes across town – who knows how, given the blood she had presumably lost.

“Baby!” She exclaimed.

“I am not your baby,” I hissed. I was tempted to rip off her other arm. When we dated, in those horror-drowned days, she would always call me diminutive or infantilising names and I’d feel caged. But then we grew up and I met Cam and everything became celestial. 

Lidnsay was still burbling. Urgh. I asked her about the ring I’d had in my pocket before death descended or ascended or whatever it did, and she snarled at the mention of Cam, calling him a thief. As if he had taken me from her, as if I hadn’t met him years later, as if she had some claim over me that lasted across the ages. 

I ripped off her other arm. I’m sorry, I had to do it! I’m not sorry, I’m lying. It was gay rights to do that, it was praxis, it was the work. Homophobia is naughty. She keeled over. Rest in pieces. I tossed the limb into the ether. It plopped down noisily near a confused fox which began to chow down. 

Anyway. I walked up to the front door and pushed it and it caved it, hinges weeping. I was not this strong in my life. Now, I’m like a crossfit champion bodybuilder. It’s like a baby, like how babies can’t regulate their strength and give everything one hundred percent at all times. I’m… like a baby. The entrance hall was empty except for a fluffy former friend. Our cat, Sinead O’Miaower, came up to me and nosily inspected my legs, but then wandered away. There was no sign of Cam. 

I went into the kitchen and made myself a sandwich, but I couldn’t eat it, couldn’t bring myself to, and instead coughed up another animal into the sink, something that caressed the food disposal unit which we’d installed at inordinate expense. I watched it shred itself. Gross. But: how can I judge? I guess I’m gross too.

Upstairs, I heard a guttural sound, a series of them, a range of glottal stops and half-baked shrieks. I figured I’d investigate. I left the sandwich lonely on its plate. Each step creaked like I was too heavy for this world. In the bedroom, Alan and Cam didn’t notice me. They were too busy fucking each other hard and raw. Alan! Of all people! 

Alan was a pharmacist, our pharmacist. He’d refilled my PrEP, for fuck’s sake. And now he was deep inside my man, weeping as he topped Cam’s shining posterior. Cam was making animal sounds, foul noises. I wasn’t familiar with them. Around me, in our times together, Cam was a silent lover. I guess maybe the pharmacist had some access to dynamite I’d lacked in life. 

I roared, they screamed, the light fixtures wobbled as if hit by some sonic inferno. I walked over to Alan and pulled him out of Cam’s asshole, and threw the pharmacist into the wall. He collapsed like a ragdoll. I guess I’m into murder at the moment, I’m making a habit of it.

“Jeff?” Cam said in a hollow voice, a hollowed-out hollow of a voice.

“That’s what they call me,” I said chirpily, stepping forward.

“How are you – what are you – what the fuck?” He asked. His eyes kept themselves on the hole in my chest, as if it was interesting, as if it was notable.

“Lindsay pulled me out of where I was. I was somewhere. Now I’m here. So, like… was Alan always a goal for you? I thought we didn’t fuck people we knew.”

“I can’t – I can’t –”

“You sound like a broken radio, Cam-cam. What’s with that? What’s with everyone being so annoying today?”

I threw my arm at him. Today was a real arm-ripping, arm-throwing, arm-moving kind of day. It was my left arm, I chucked it with my right-hand. Said left arm hit Cam in the head and he screamed. It must have hit him hard, it immediately left a bloody dent. I wandered over and bore over him, picked my arm back up and reattached it. Little worms that had been visible in the socket retreated. 

“Aaargh!” Cam kept yelling. So I punched him in the head, and didn’t stop punching him, and looked down at the messy mess. He’d always loved red berries and now he looked like strawberry conserve interrupted by bony bones.

A few hours later, I sat in the park and watched my body really start to decompose. It was a strange sight. My toes were declaring independence from my feet. I’d killed three people. Maybe more, depending on what happened with that car crash earlier. Or fewer, depending on whether or not you think Naughty Lindsay with her Bad Energy counted as a person. Loneliness was beginning to swaddle me like I was a newborn, which in a way I was. I didn’t know whether I was coming or going, living or leaving. A toe did fall off. I watched it crawl away like a nailed beetle. Oof!

I felt good and bad and every flavour of everything. I could taste something rotten under my tongue, before my tongue fell out of my mouth and started to make up a strange polka. It was held aloft by little suckered tentacles. I was carrying some of Cam’s brain-goo in my good hand. When we first met, I’d loved his brain, the way he thought about things, the way he puzzled things out. I loved the way you could see his thoughts in his irises, dancing around his pupils. I closed my eyes. Maybe peace would descend like a miasma, but, like, the good kind.

When I woke up, I was looking at liquid and glass. My body was sitting nearby against a wall, headless, and I was floating in what traditionally would probably be called a vat. Lindsay, armless and foul-faced, was staring at me from across the room, a maniacal glint in her eye. Quite how she’d managed to get me back down here without her arms was beyond me. I snorted slightly at the image of her lifting my head up with her feet. Credit where credit was due, Lindsay always had great pedicures in our youth, so my imagination gave her great nails even still.

“Shouldn’t you be dead?” I asked despite the fluid in my mouth, in my severed throat, and she understood me and went on some rant about how she was going to live forever, how she’d sold her soul to the gods beyond and the creatures beyond that, and now we could be together eternally. I pictured eldritch entities in a white-pillared city playing with her soul and being thoroughly disappointed by its squelchy and fundamentally stupid nature. 

I made my headless body stand up, which unnerved her. I could still control it with a degree of thought and focus. I made it shake and shimmy and move threateningly towards her.

“Jeff…” She said, as a warning. It was a tone I remembered from when she’d hurled the porcelain at me. I was sick of being controlled and abused and coerced. How to kill a homophobe who’d live forever? How to escape a glass case, literally – and, well, un-literally?

In the end, I just threw my entire body weight at her. She lay on the floor moaning and I started to smash my head against the vat’s wall with my titanic strength and aggression until the glass shattered and I fell to the ground. I’d have said ouch if I had the capacity to feel pain anymore. I swivelled my way near my body, rolled decisively in its direction and re-attached myself at the neck – backwards, but it didn’t matter. I stood and looked at Lindsay on the floor. There were shards everywhere, and she was looking up at me with a mixture of love and rage.

I hummed a tune to myself, one I barely remembered, and then I went upstairs into her homely little home and wedged chairs and tables and a cupboard against the basement door. She could live forever if she wanted – but she could do it down there, where the bigots belong. Locked away.

I moseyed around her house for a few minutes. I kicked the skirting boards, I drank some water and watched it spill out where my windpipe should have been. I thought back to being young, since before love, since before everything. It was okay, wasn’t it? There had been promise there, hadn’t there?

Then I spent a few moments looking at the pictures of me on the walls, taped onto the windows, stabbed onto cork boards. For a second I missed my beauty, my youth, the me I could have been. 

I twisted my skull back into place. And then I went back out into the night, where I now belonged.