The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home

Chapter 13 (Part 1) - Clio

Well, dear readers: Of course I was peeking out the kitchen window at the romantic scene unfolding on the back porch. Just as you would have done.

I’d lifted the corner of the white curtain just a little – I do like a white curtain in a kitchen, especially when starched. Though I have to admit these curtains are not as white nor as starchy as they were before Barbarina the Cleaner got attacked on the street by three of Toronto’s finest traffic police. They were not articulate – they were gibbering – but Barbarina did not immediately know the difference, and English was not her first language. I’m assuming that, since the Toronto traffic police had gibbered at her on several previous occasions when she was attempting to parallel park, she did not think it out of the ordinary until they bit her.

Now I take a stab at the curtains myself, and keep them at least from turning Tattle-Tale Grey, but I do not have Barbarina’s touch with an iron. For those of my readers who do not know what Tattle-Tale Grey is – well, it does date me, I suppose. It comes from a laundry soap advertisement from the days before there were electric dryers. You did not want your neighbours to see your white sheets and towels hanging outside on the line if they were a dingy shade of grey: thus you would be ratted out by your very own laundry.

Which must have increased the paranoia level among the housewives of those days: I know it did mine. Because back then, when the world was new but also falling apart, as it is now – it does seem to be a constant pattern, with the world – my husband, Dexter, and I were not at all well off, and we could not afford a Barbarina. So I viewed every object in the house as a potential stool pigeon, standing by to announce to the world through its undusted, unpolished exterior what a slovenly housekeeper I was. Oh, the shame.

But back to the present day.

There, outside the kitchen window, was a heart-melting example of Love’s First Kiss. Always so touching, don’t you think? Love’s Millionth Kiss is also cause for celebration: when a couple hits the diamond wedding anniversary cheers go up, much as when an overturned life boat with two survivors clinging to it finally washes ashore. It is not the shape they are in that impresses: merely the fact that they are there at all, when so many others have expired or jumped overboard.

It’s all those other kisses – the ones in the middle – that fail to inspire the onlooker; although, without the middle, what would beginnings and endings really amount to? Which is why, I thought, as I dropped the curtain corner – thus drawing a line between elderly snoop, imbued with natural curiosity, and unhealthy voyeur  – which is why I was willing to invest some faith and hope in this young man, Hughes, who was tentatively embracing my darling Oakie on the back porch. He was a middleman if I ever saw one. Nothing flashy, but he saw a thing through. He ferried his cargo from here to there. He held to his appointed rounds, through sleet, snow, and zombies. Surely he was a keeper. But how to keep him?

Nor was that the only problem facing me. Oakie had taken against me. She’d concluded, through the discovery of an empty bottle, that I had deliberately zombified her mother, Sumatra, by sending her – at her offensively imperious request– a bottle of “Glowing Skull” brain-enhancing sports drink.

Did I know it would have the effect that it did? No. I did not know: Dexter himself did not know. Of course not, or he wouldn’t have experimented on himself the way he did. And no one could have known that “Glowing Skull” would interact with the common cold virus and possibly with a species-jumping microbe carried by the ordinary dust mite to produce the unpleasant effects we see before us.

The fact was that the bottle I’d sent to Sumatra wasn’t even the product that had already been commercially deployed, in Canada and other countries, though not in the United States. It was one of Dexter’s, from an experimental batch. And I’d sent it quite early, at a time when citizens of the United States were ordering “Glowing Skull” from Canada over the Internet, and telling their friends about what an astonishingly energizing effect it had on them. Sumatra could easily have obtained a supply in that way, and probably did.

But she wanted the early bottle with the signature of its famous inventor on it: she said it was for a charity auction. Then, having already consumed enough of the internet-obtained commercial product to addle her judgment, and also to become addicted by it – for the fluorescent brew did have that effect, it seems – she quaffed the sample.

I admit it: I did not handle the interchange with Okie very well. I should have explained all of this. But, like many young people of her age, she was in a hurry to point the finger at her elders and then to flounce out of the room. Which was wounding, but only to be expected: where there are young girls, flouncing is more or less built in.

Possibly, I thought, I could redeem myself in her eyes by writing an account of the “Glowing Skull” episode that she could read when in a cooler frame of mind. I would be further redeemed if I could devise a plan whereby the stalwart Hughes might accompany us to England on our mission to deposit Sumatra at the Happy Zombie Sunrise Home. The space had already been reserved for her there – it was not cheap, but I got the Premium Package, which included French lessons and charcuterie tastings every Thursday – so all we had to do was get her onto an airplane. And ourselves as well, of course; while first having made it as far as the airport. The Z-Liner vehicle driven by Hughes would be essential for that.

I called Fly-By-Night, the charter service I have used before, to make the booking. But all I got was a recorded message:

Fly-By-Night regrets to report that, due to high winds, free-floating organic fragments, and an excess of crows, causing a hazard to jet engines, our charter service is grounded until further notice. We value our customers and your call is important to us. Please call again later.   

Crap! I thought as I put down the phone. I do permit myself the occasional strongly-worded thought, especially at moments like these. Crapulous crappie crap crap! What crapping next?