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8 8 8 8 8 What do you know, fool, all you know is what you see in the movies: clashing jaws and bloody teeth; raw hunger lurching in to eat you, thud thud thud. We are nothing like you think. The zombie that comes for you is indifferent to flesh. What it takes from you is tasteless, odorless, colorless, and huge. You have a lot to lose. The incursion is gradual. It does not count the hours or months it may spend circling the bedroom where you sleep. For the zombie, there is no anxiety and no waiting. We walk in a zone that transcends disorders like human emotion. In the cosmos of the undead there is only being and un-being, without reference to time. Therefore your zombie keeps its distance, fixed on the patch of warmth that represents you, the unseemly racket you make, breathing. Does your heart have to make all that noise, does your chest have to keep going in and out with that irritating rasp? The organs of the undead are sublimely still. Anything else is an abomination. Then you cough in your sleep. It is like an invitation. We are at your bedroom window. The thing we need is laid open for us to devour. For no reason you sit up in bed with your heart jumping and your jaw ajar: what? Nothing, you tell yourself, because you have to if you’re going to make it through the night. Just something I ate. Hush, if you enjoy living. Be still. Try to be as still as me. Whatever you do, don’t go to the window! Your future crouches below, my perfect body cold and dense as marble, the eyes devoid of light. If you expect to go on being yourself tomorrow when the sun comes up, stay awake! Do it! This is the only warning you’ll get. One woman alone, naturally you are uneasy, but you think you’re safe. Didn’t you lock the windows when you went to bed last night, didn’t you lock your doors and slip the dead bolt? Nice house, gated community with Security patrolling, what could go wrong? You don’t know that while you sleep the zombie seeks entry. This won’t be anything like you think. Therefore you stumble to the bathroom and pad back to your bedroom in the The Zombie Prince 346 k i t r e e d dark. You drop on the bed like a felled cedar, courting sleep. It’s as close as you can get to being one of us. Go ahead, then. Sleep like a stone and if tonight the zombie who has come for you slips in and takes what it needs from you, tomorrow you will not wake up, exactly. You will get up. Changed. When death comes for you, you don’t expect it to be tall and gorgeous. You won’t even know the name of the disaster that overtakes you until it’s too late. Last night Dana Graver wished she could just bury herself in bed and never have to wake up. She’d rather die than go on feeling the way she does. She wanted to die the way women do when the man they love ends it with no apologies and no explanation. “I’d understand,” she cried, “if this was about another girl.” And Bill Wylie, the man she thought she loved—that she thought loved her! Bill gave her that bland, sad look and said unhelpfully, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this any more.” Her misery is like a bouquet of broken glass flowers, every petal a jagged edge tearing her up inside. She would do anything to make it stop. She’d never put herself out—no pills, no razor blades for Dana Graver, no blackened corpse for Bill to find, although he deserves an ugly shock. She’d never consciously hurt herself but if she lies on her back in the dark and wills herself to die it might just accidentally happen, would that be so bad? Let the heartless bastard come in and find his sad, rejected love perfectly composed , lovely in black with her white hands folded gracefully and her dark hair flowing, a reproach that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Look what you did to me. Doesn’t he deserve to know what it sounds like to hear your own heart break...

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