Olivia Bennett
Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Quintero-Gonzales has resigned herself for being much too old for children’s stories about God, but when the undead come knocking at her door, she finds herself praying for the first time since Sunday school.
“Oh calm down, mija,” says her mother, looking down at her through the strips of white toilet paper wrapped around her face. She is supposed to be a mummy, but Rosa Quintero-Gonzales conveniently left a wide gap that exposes her bustling cleavage. “It’s just the Wilsons.” Her mother opens the front door with a scrape, and in stumble their neighbors. Ed Wilson—followed by his wife and their 10-year-old twin sons—scuffle into the entry-way: a small area covered by fading linoleum, separated from the thin carpet of the living room by a peeling metal band.
Mrs. Wilson, Ed’s wife, wears a tattered gossamer dress that clings to her athletic form. A deep cut made from pasty scar wax protrudes like a fin from her cheek. The cheap Halloween makeup was clearly made for white people, and Mrs. Wilson has tried to cover the imperfection with her brown foundation and an additional layer of ghastly greenish gray grease paint. The twins’ curly brown hair has been teased into unruly shapes, and their eyes are smudged into a sunken black. Ed has dirt in his blond hair, and his shirt is artfully torn at the chest to reveal a fake ribcage and sternum, glistening artificially white in the flickering party lights.
Rosa giggles with sheer delight as Ed crashes into her, scooping his childhood friend up into a hug. “Oh stop, stop stop, Ed! You’ll eat me up!” her mother squeals, kicking her bare feet. Lizzie watches, still sulking in the threshold between the kitchen and the front room. She’s privy to the glare that Mrs. Wilson shoots at the pair of them, wrapped in each other’s arms as if Rosa is trying to ensnare Ed with her toilet-paper costume. The fragile white strips crinkle and tear much too easily.
The twins, Riley and Hudson, burst their way in as if this is their house. Their little hands claw at the Quintero-Gonzales furniture, already sniffing for candy.
“What’re you supposed to be, Lizzie?” Riley asks, cocking his head at her. He sneers, revealing the fake blood painted along his crusty kid mouth. The whole Wilson family, it seems, has gone for a zombie-fied look this Halloween.
“Mikasa Ackerman from Attack on Titan. You’re too young to get it,” Lizzie says, crossing her arms.
Hudson rolls his eyes, and for a moment, Lizzie is truly frightened again—at the sheer whiteness that appears on his gray face,—glossy and jelly and ringed with crawling red blood vessels. “You got any candy?”
Lizzie blinks, but shrugs the feeling off. She jabs her thumb over her shoulder. “Kitchen table in the big plastic bowl.”
When the twins thunder past her, their stomping feet and hungry hands digging around in the candy bowl sound like a swarm of midsummer wasps.
“There ain’t nothing good in here! Just butterscotches and black licorice!” one of the twins says—Lizzie can’t tell which. A piece of candy smacks her in the back of the head, and she grimaces, leaning down to pick it up. She rolls the golden morsel around in the palm of her hand. Louis liked butterscotch. She resists the urge to throw it back.
Three mixed drinks later, and Lizzie’s mother’s laughter drips off the walls of the Quintero-Gonzales’ townhouse. It soaks into the carpet, hangs in the air like the stench of death. The adults are upstairs in the living room, watching some scary movie that her mother says isn’t appropriate for the kids. Lizzie is old enough to resent that label, since she’s stuck in the basement watching Riley and Hudson beat each other up on the Xbox. She’s seen all three seasons of Attack on Titan; she’s sure that some corny Halloween movie won’t scare her.
Lizzie looks up when one of the wooden planks creaks upstairs. It’s not uncommon—her and her mother rent a house from the seventies—but Lizzie is both miffed and a little on edge. She feels on the precipice of something—something dangerous, something fearful, something good. Or she could just be thirteen.
She leans on her hand, propped up by her elbow, deforming her face as she sinks deeper and deeper into their basement couch—the brown corduroy one that smells faintly like dust and mildew. The rapid cacophony of video game sound effects flash throughout the basement, but Lizzie can tune that out. Her eyes glaze over as the screen becomes a blur—white, red, blue, green—all one after the other.
“I’m hungry,” she says to no one in particular. Neither of the twins look up; they’re too busy gulping down the competition.
Lizzie gets up from the couch with a creak and wanders over to the exposed wooden staircase leading upstairs. She pauses there, floating in the half-darkness of the basement. Glancing over to the twins, their brown eyes soak up the screen light like dry sponges. Riley’s black curls stick up in the back. She resists the urge to walk down the stairs and comb it back into place with her fingers, even though she doesn’t even particularly like the Wilson twins. Louis had this cowlick in the back of his head, too, and he would always go to school without brushing his hair. He would never let Rosa touch it—only Lizzie was allowed to smooth down his hair before they got out of the car and walked the rest of the way to school.
At the top of the stairs, Lizzie pauses, listening to the sounds of the adults seep in through the crack beneath the door: laughter again, the creaking of the upstairs couch, and the scraping and squelching and screaming of some eighties horror movie.
With a pop, she turns the faded brass knob and pushes open the door. Lizzie emerges into the split light and dark: on her right, the orange light of the overhead oven bulb, and on her left the navy darkness and harsh flickering of gore on screen. Her mother’s wavy head of hair leans onto Ed’s shoulder, his blond hair spiked in every direction. The pair exchanges soft, wraith-like giggles. Ed breathes deeply into her mother’s ear, the glisten of his tongue extending to her earlobe. White strips of her mother’s costume dangle over the back of the couch. Mrs. Wilson is nowhere to be seen.
Lizzie wanders into the kitchen unnoticed. It’s uncomfortably warm, despite the cracked windows letting in October’s biting breeze, so she pulls off her red Mikasa scarf and sets it on the kitchen table next to the candy bowl. From the back door window, she sees the porchlight is on. Mrs. Wilson smokes a cigarette, hand dangled over her bunched-up knees.
Lizzie opens the back door, the cool air meeting her cheeks. Mrs. Wilson turns around, tossing her black braids over her shoulder. “Hey, Lizzie,” she says.
Lizzie presses her lips together. She doesn’t know Mrs. Wilson’s first name, but still feels better out here with her than she does in her own house. Maybe it’s the fresh air.
“Shouldn’t you be at a sleepover? With some friends or something?” Mrs. Wilson takes a long drag from her cigarette, glowing pumpkin-orange. She leaves behind purple lipstick on the filter.
“Don’t have any,” Lizzie says, sitting down next to Mrs. Wilson on the crooked slab of concrete that functions as their back porch. Lizzie rolls a stray piece of gravel in between her fingers.
“That’s a shame. Kids are mean these days,” Mrs. Wilson flicks some ash off the side of the porch, into the black abyss below.
“Have you met your kids? One of them threw candy at my head.” The words come out before Lizzie can scarf them back down.
Mrs. Wilson barks out a laugh anyways. “No, it’s alright. They may look like me, but they take after my husband.”
Lizzie is only thirteen, so she doesn’t know how to respond to that in a way that won’t sound stupid. She tosses the bit of gravel into the brown, dry grass of the backyard. It lands with a tiny, almost imperceptible thud. Lizzie frowns; for some reason, she expected the grass to ripple outwards like great concentric rings when a stone breaks the surface of a lake. It doesn’t make sense, how something can disappear like that.
“Are you hanging in there? With you know, your brother and all,” Mrs. Wilson says, gesturing with her hands. Her nails are painted black and chipping, revealing her medium brown skin beneath. She turns, reaching behind her and grabbing an orange Solo cup. Like her cigarette, she takes a long, laborious drink, an imprint of decaying purple left behind. Lizzie can’t help but think of it like the pictures she saw at school, of ancient cave paintings of prehistoric human hands. As if Mrs. Wilson needs to be seen, remembered, leaving bits of her on everything she touches.
Lizzie grunts in response to her question.
“It’s alright, you don’t have to talk about it. Losing a family member’s just about the worst thing God can put us through.”
Lizzie looks over at Mrs. Wilson. Her neighbor, her mother’s friend—a woman she only knows in passing, but a woman who carries herself differently than her mother does. Maybe that’s solely because Mrs. Wilson isn’t her mother, so Lizzie doesn’t see Mrs. Wilson through the same rose-colored, fingerprint-smudged filter. Rosa is tainted in Lizzie’s memory, but Mrs. Wilson seems pure, somehow.
“What’s your first name?” Lizzie asks.
Mrs. Wilson scoffs out a laugh. “Jazmine,” she says. “But I bet you know my husband’s name.”
“Why do you let him treat you like that?”
Mrs. Wilson shrugs, digging the end of her cigarette into the concrete. It leaves behind a dead, black spot. “Eh. You know. Like I said, losing a family member is the worst thing God can put us through. I lost one husband, and I managed to get another one. Might as well dig in my nails and hold on tight.”
Lizzie frowns. “Do you even believe in God?”
“I used to,” says Mrs. Wilson—Jazmine. “Sometimes I still do.” Even dressed like a zombie, Mrs. Wilson still smells sweet. Like coconut.
Long after Mrs. Wilson has gone back inside—Lizzie can’t seem to call her Jazmine—Lizzie remains outside, looking at the stars. The skeleton silhouette of the bare tree in their backyard obscures the gibbous moon. Crunchy leaves rustle like goosebumps on skin, and from across the street, another Halloween party has gotten out of control. A teenage boy pukes on the front lawn, just barely illuminated by the moonlight and the yellow electric light that streams out from the house’s windows. Lizzie feels the thump of bass in the hollow of her chest.
The orange Solo cup that Mrs. Wilson left behind is Lizzie’s only companion, and in the harsh porchlight, it looks like it’s been cut in half vertically, from orange into black.
Lizzie reaches over and picks up the Solo cup. It’s about half full with red, clear liquid swirling around, and at the bottom bobbles a gummy eyeball, blue and deformed. Lizzie reaches in, past the clinking ice cubes and pulls out the gummy candy and pops it into her mouth. Sweet and sour, she puckers as the remnants of the cherry liquid leave a dry, smacking feeling on her tongue. She chomps down on the gummy eyeball nonetheless.
Lizzie’s not stupid. This is alcohol. Did Mrs. Wilson leave the cup behind on purpose? She can’t be sure.
Lizzie decides that it doesn’t matter. She gulps down the rest of the cup and smacks the plastic back down onto the concrete porch, despite the boy puking across the street, despite her mother’s lewd actions inside, despite her dead, dead, dead brother.
As she lies back onto the concrete porch, Lizzie feels her body soaking up the alcohol like a dry riverbed. She blinks. The stars aren’t just white anymore. They aberrate into television colors—white, red, blue, green—all one after the other. Breaking into their component parts. She wonders what Louis’ Halloween costume would have been this year.
Something motivates Lizzie to get up. She’s not sure what moves her to do so—maybe it’s the fact that the party across the street is dying down, and now the night is too quiet. Maybe it’s the fact that Lizzie’s three gulps of alcohol only intoxicated her for about twenty minutes. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s cold, after having taken off her costume scarf. Maybe it’s none of those things, or maybe it’s that Lizzie doesn’t want to be alone anymore.
Back inside, the Quintero-Gonzales house is quiet. The oven light buzzes on continuously, spilling orange light onto the cheap linoleum. Lizzie walks over to the kitchen table and unwraps a golden butterscotch, popping it into her mouth. It clicks against her teeth, but she savors the nostalgic buttery flavor. For a moment, she is somewhere else: under the bright summer sun with her brother, green grass tickling their faces, devouring blue raspberry popsicles and ham and cheese sandwiches. She is the smell of her brother’s skin when he was just a baby, smooth and brown. She remembers the weight that fell on her, then. The weight that has only gotten heavier.
Lizzie returns to her kitchen. It remains awfully quiet. The kitchen is still warm, balmy on her face and sweaty along her tongue. Where is Mrs. Wilson? Light leaks out from underneath the bathroom door. That must be where she is.
The sound of crunchy static explodes from the tube television set in the living room. Lizzie flinches. From around the corner, the room flickers from white to gray to black and back again. With socked feet, Lizzie walks forward into the living room, shrouded in artificial, strobing light.
Her mother Rosa and Ed are tangled on the couch, a single body of limbs and knees and clawing fingers. At first, Lizzie cringes, thinking that she’s walked in on her mother cheating with her neighbor—until she realizes that it’s much worse. Her mother’s head pops up from the intimate embrace with bloody tendons hanging from her mouth like bits of spaghetti. Ed’s face looks no different, her mother’s bitten-off earlobe languishing on his red tongue. He bites down, chewing on the bit of flesh like the fatty trimmings of a steak.
Lizzie’s body screams, but her voice doesn’t. She can’t—how could she?
Her mother is gone. So is Ed. Their eyes glow, and yet there is nothing behind them at all. The empty hiss of security lights inside buildings at night. The hollow reflection of a new moon. A smile that doesn’t reach the eyes. Silhouetted by the static, Lizzie recognizes them for what they are: zombies, creatures of the night, bodies hung in limbo between life and death, souls unstuck from their physical forms—so desperate for one another that they have become each other. Skin to skin is not enough. It was inevitable that they consumed one another. Dead things with beating human skin.
It’s not until one of them moves that Lizzie actually screams—so piercing that it shatters the thin streams of fabric that held the Quintero-Gonzales household together. Fear rattles the skeleton inside of Lizzie. She feels her bones shake like the quaking of earth’s beginning. Oh, how quickly it all falls apart! The civilized world and its conventions are gone, and Lizzie’s house is now full of rabid animals. Foreign bodies, demons.
Lizzie scrambles backward, so intensely that she smacks against the wall. The bathroom door to her left swings open, cutting the Halloween darkness with a jagged knife. Mrs. Wilson—no, Jazmine— stumbles out of the bathroom, handfuls of her fleshy cheeks held in her hands. She laughs, and her white teeth peek out like thousands of rows of shark teeth, rimmed in blood. Jazmine slurps up her own flesh in her hand as effortlessly as an oyster at a cocktail party.
Lizzie freezes in terror, her arms away from her body, fingers splayed out, ready to tear and claw herself if it comes to that. But Mrs. Wilson—Jazmine—slumps against the doorjamb and lights a cigarette. The smoke clouds in her mouth and seeps out through her cheek-holes, the gray smoke boiling her raw flesh a sooty black.
Lizzie is going to vomit. She’s sure of it. She can’t believe it, but she must. She can’t believe her brother’s death, but it was real. Just as real as this. And soon it will become just another memory.
Lizzie turns to the basement door, suddenly worried about the two snot-nosed twins she didn’t care about only moments earlier. But as she approaches the door, it rattles violently, clanging against its hinges. Ragged breathing bleeds from the seams, and Lizzie backs away slowly in horror.
That’s it, then. Everyone in her house has transformed into the undead. Or, perhaps, they already were. Lizzie just couldn’t see it until now.
Lizzie scrambles for the front door, but when she turns to look over her shoulder, it seems that the infectious bodies in her house don’t seem too interested in her. Rosa, Ed, and Jazmine stare at the static of the tv and their bodies sway along with the pulsing. Jazmine lays a head on her husband’s ground-meat shoulder, rubbing her raw cheek into it affectionately. Rosa licks blood off Ed’s fingers. There’s something about this that Lizzie feels like she shouldn’t be seeing.
They don’t turn when Lizzie clamors up the steps on all fours, scrambling through her room for anything useful, valuable. Clothes, meds, toothbrush. A bar of soap. A first aid kit from the bathroom closet. All shoved into her backpack, whose school contents have been vomited onto the floor, save for a notebook and pencil.
Lizzie laces up her shoes and looks around at her room, barely lit by the moonlight streaming in through her sheer curtains. It wasn’t clean to begin with, but all is still, and she is whole, for now. Lizzie knows that she has to leave, at least for the night. What she’ll do after that, she doesn’t know. Is this some Halloween-fueled mania? Or is this the consequence of alcohol or some poison in the air? Will she turn, will she be affected? Is her mother and the Wilson family dead, or are they something else? Something terribly liminal?
Lizzie puts a hand over her stomach, one that continues to spasm and churn in fear. She’s not sure. She never is.
She wanders over to her desk and crouches down by the drawers that line its sides. She peels open one, revealing a container of her childhood toys. She picks up a blond Barbie, plastic, peach-toned boobs perky, platinum hair in a matted tangle.
Lizzie pulls open her jaws and bites the Barbie’s head off with a pop. She spits the head into the maw of her backpack.
With a sigh, she straps the doll’s body in between her pants and the brown belt of her Attack on Titan costume. She pounds down the stairs and opens the door, her feet sliding on the slick linoleum.
Lizzie crashes into the Halloween night, star-speckled and smelling sharp like metal and wet dirt. Sirens howl against the night, lighting up the silhouettes of faraway trees in blue and red, the sound swirling around Lizzie like a tornado. The teenage boy still pukes onto the front lawn of the party across the street. Has he always been puking? Or is this round two? The gibbous moon glares down at her with a judgmental, half-cocked white sclera.
A maroon SUV whizzes by, white headlights cutting a slit in the navy universe. For a moment, Lizzie is breathless. She questions herself—if she too is turning now, feeling the call of death, her soul detaching from her body like a ghostly linen sheet caught in the wind. Lizzie is only thirteen; she cannot be sure, and yet she is sure of nothing else.
Her feet walk her out into the street. Her pink, sparkly tennis shoes crunch the gravel beneath. She slides off her backpack and lies down. Right in the middle of the street, to be pulverized just like her brother was. She hopes that a car rolls over her neck, chomping down like razor teeth on a sour gummy worm. She hopes that tire tracks crush her ribcage like the crawling husk of a spider, found in the dusty corners of the kitchen and smushed with a tissue. She hopes that her jaw gapes open in a perpetual scream. Louis, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.
The headless doll clutched in her hand, Lizzie feels herself becoming one with the road, her arms spread wide like Jesus on a crucifix. Even though Lizzie knows she is too old for children’s stories about God, under the Halloween moon she still finds herself praying to a God she doesn’t believe in. She used to, and sometimes she still does.
Elizabeth Quintero-Gonzales turns her face heavenward. The starlight aberrates—white, red, blue, green—all one after the other.