Part 1 I woke up early and looked out the window. Mount Si rose straight out of the fog, dark and unmoving, its sides disappearing into low clouds. It looked close enough to touch, like it was watching the valley wake up. I went outside to grab the gunny sacks. The grass soaked my shoes,…
“If it was real… what was it?”
The smile in the glass didn’t leave—it followed me, into the quiet, into the dark… and into whatever was howling outside.
“I saw myself.”
But the face in the glass wasn’t right—because it smiled when I didn’t, like something else had already figured me out.
A deposit was madefrom the back of the rain.It was not symbiosisbut a gritty coexistence. A shard of glass by a rocklies dulled with corrosion.Was it a bottle or a jar?Who knows. It may have helda grand liquor once,fancied in a ballroom,carrying an ingredientthat tainted the bloodof celebrations long past. Happiness through inebriationgrants a moment’s…
“I’m a vampombie.”
What started as a gas stop turned into something worse—because now it wasn’t just zombies. It was new rules, new names… and none of them made sense.
“I don’t do roads,” Ernest said.
It wasn’t caution. It was survival.
Because walking down a road with a zombie only works right up until someone else sees you.
“This is the best gift I’ve ever gotten.”
It wasn’t perfect. Neither were we—but for once, it was finished, and it was finally hers.
“You’re a zombie.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been called that before.”
The problem wasn’t that he was dead.
It was that he could think… and he was still hungry.
The song was terrible.
Zombies aren’t vintage. They’re not real.
That’s what I thought—right up until something stepped out of the trees and proved me wrong.
“I’m pregnant.”
One sentence turned a perfect summer into something heavier—where love stopped being imagined and started becoming a choice.
