Ralph tore the man’s scalp off with his fingernails, bit into the cranium, cracking it with his molars like a walnut. He revealed the gray contents and dove in face first.
“Brains,” he drawled contentedly, slurping like a child sucking the gooey center out of a Cadbury egg.
I rolled my eyes and sighed, looking down at the dead woman whose head I cradled in my hands. I used an incisor to pop a hole in her skull, inserted a straw and sucked gingerly. Most people think brains are a solid mass, but they’re actually mostly liquid. They take the shape of any container they’re put in. That’s why they get everywhere if you’re not careful. Most zombies didn’t seem to mind being covered in it. In fact, ones like Ralph reveled in it, always making sure to smear some around before finishing. Guess it’s like when people take pictures of their dinner and post it on Facebook—everyone wants to remember a good meal.
“Brains,” Ralph said again, a little more urgently. Bits of brain matter clung to his lower lip and his mouth had the same Kool-Aid ring around it I used to get when I was a kid.
Ralph tapped the side of the man’s head he was devouring and then pointed toward the one in my hand. He always worried I wasn’t eating enough. Gotta keep my strength up to continue terrorizing the world as one of the walking dead. He was right though—I was far skinnier than any of the other zombies I’d seen since I turned.
“Yeah, yeah, brains,” I grimaced, sucking a little bit more brain through the straw.
This is the level of discourse that happens amongst zombies. After a time I realized they were like little cannibalistic Pokemon, as they can only say one word; to wit, “brains.” That’s it. That was what I had to work with. “Good morning.” “Brains.” “Good afternoon.” “Brains.” “Oh! That blood stain on your shirt is just darling.” “Brains.”
Why, you ask, if I am one of the undead as well, am I able to converse at a higher level? Yeah, I definitely ask myself that question every day. Every day since I woke up to being dead. Or undead. The living dead? I never really understood the difference, but I remember an ex telling me once there was indeed a difference. Since he had seen every zombie film ever made and had a tattoo of Dawn of the Dead spanning his entire back, I accepted his expertise. However, given that humans either scream and run or start shooting, I haven’t found anyone to help me clarify the distinction.
Either way, I woke up a zombie. I remembered I was walking to my car after yoga the night before. Fifteen of us all headed towards the parking lot. Nothing but stretch pants and blue yoga mats as far as the eye could see. Of course we had all heard the alerts not to go out after dark if you could avoid it, and if you did, not to travel in groups so you were less like a herd of cattle, fat and grazing. But no one really listened to that stuff. After all, there hadn’t been a zombie attack in Portland—-it was all on the east coast where folks lived more densely populated. There had been no reported outbreaks further west than Chicago.
Perky Blonde #2 heard them first (I never bothered to learn the names of the other women in my yoga class. They were all white women who fastidiously spent their time ignoring the existence of the one Black woman in their midst. And at this point, I guess it really doesn’t matter what her name was.). Perky Blonde # 2 shrieked and I looked in the direction her quivering finger pointed. Shuffling shapes lurched toward us from the darkness. Red eyes glowed. As they got closer, I could hear the zombies moan and growl. It sounded like a mix of a pissed off Chihuahua and a very tired ghost.
Most of my classmates joined Perky Blonde #2 in screaming. I decided to save my oxygen, and turned to sprint in the opposite direction—only to find while we had been distracted, an even larger group of zombies had snuck up behind us—which is actually pretty impressive when you think about their motor function challenges.
Two of them lunged at me—I tried to beat them off with the yoga mat, but one bit it, shook, and spit it out.
Zombies move much slower than humans. Painfully slow. Like grandpa with a broken hip, arthritis, and a knee that’s ‘acting up because it’s about to rain’ slow. It always seemed asinine to me that people couldn’t just run away from a zombie. Hell, all you’d have to do is speed up your walking pace just a little bit. I would watch zombie films with my ex and I’d think to myself, “Well, if you’re that stupid, you deserve to get eaten.”
What I learned that night is that it’s not zombies’ speed that is the threat—it’s their numbers. They massed around us like cockroaches in a roach motel. They were everywhere, a swarm of grasping hands and gnashing dripping teeth. And of course the endless refrain of “Brains, brains, brains!” If I hadn’t been so terrified, it would have been highly irritating.
I noticed, however, that the zombies mostly massed around my classmates. The lone zombie who grabbed at me looked put out, like I was the leftover kid in dodgeball and he’d just got stuck with me on his team. He grabbed my arm and began chewing, reluctantly.
You never know what you’re going to do in a situation like that. Because of my ex, I had spent hours thinking what I would do if I was attacked by zombies. I always imagined I would fight back, break free. Run away. Hide.
But when faced with the actual imminent danger of a zombie chowing down on my flesh, I did something I would have never imagined—I bit the zombie back. I just clamped down on his shoulder and locked my jaw. I don’t know which of us was more surprised. He yelped around my arm in his mouth, tried to shake me off. But I open bottle caps with my teeth all the time; I have a surprisingly strong jaw.
So we just stayed that way, until I passed out from blood loss. When I woke up early in the morning before dawn, I was a zombie.
Except different. I definitely have the living dead limp, as I call it, which can be very frustrating. You just have to resign yourself that it takes you five times longer to get anywhere than it did when you were human. But I can still speak (as my white college professors would say with surprise and more than a little condescension, “You are so articulate!”), and I can still reason, whereas I quickly learned my former classmates-now-zombies seemed to have the collective IQ of pudding.
It took me some time reflecting, but I narrowed down the reason I don’t follow the zombie stereotype to two options. The first is the same reason I shocked myself by biting the zombie who turned me.
You see—I’m vegan.
I’m a vegan zombie.
The second is a question of melanin. You see, I’m also Black. I’m a Black vegan zombie in Portland, Oregon. Life is, in a word, rough.
I originally thought my veganness had to be the thing that allows me to still think as a human. It is the only concrete difference between me and my yoga classmates. You’d think there’d have been more vegans in that yuppy yoga studio (that I actually only went to because I got a Groupon), but I’d seen enough fro-yo containers in the trash can to know I was probably alone.
My veganness could explain the reaction of the zombies during our attack—they all shied away from me because I smelled different, tasted different.
Or maybe racism persists even after you’re (un)dead. All of the zombies I’d seen were white. Not surprising given that I live in the whitest major city in the country. But maybe it wasn’t just based on demographics. Maybe these white zombies believed some fucked up Bell Curve eugenist theories. They could subscribe to turn of the century craniometry, which measures the size of the head to judge intelligence (spoiler alert: Black folks lost that contest). If that’s the case, it would make a twisted sort of sense: the zombies wouldn’t want to get stuck with a small head. Small head equals small brain. If you’re really hungry, what are you going to go for, the appetizer or the main course?
Regardless if they judge me for my race or my dietary choices, it’s clear the other zombies do judge me. Oh sure, they let me mass with them when we are hunting and feeding, but when work is done, they drift off, babbling “brains” back and forth to each other animatedly and leaving me to contemplate my Kafka-esque existence.
All but Ralph. Ralph is the only one who spends time with me. Who seems to like being around me.
Sometimes I envy Ralph, and all the others. They have a singularity of purpose, and as long as they get some brains, their lives are fulfilled.
I, on the other hand, have been in the throes of a moral dilemma since I woke up dead. How do you maintain your vegan principles when the only source of food that sates your hunger is flesh?
I have tried to find ways around it. I thought, well, perhaps it’s protein we living dead crave. I broke into a health food store and grabbed all the vegan protein bars I could find. When I tried to eat them, though, I was so repulsed I couldn’t even swallow.
I even tried to trick myself. I got a head of cauliflower and a can of marinara sauce. Ralph and I went to a 7-Eleven and while he munched on the clerk, I heated it up in one of their microwaves. When it was piping hot, I pulled it out.
“Hmmm, these brains sure look good,” I said as I inhaled deeply, taking in the scent.
Ralph watched me out of the corner of his eye, utterly confused.
“These are gonna be the best damn brains I ever had!” I declared. I grabbed a chunk and shoved it in my mouth. I wanted to retch instantly, but I soldiered on.
“Ugh ... good … brains,” I choked out around the fake-bloody cauliflower.
I chewed as quickly as I could and then swallowed. It took less than 10 seconds for my stomach to send my vegan mock brain right back up the way it came.
Ralph looked at me sadly and held out the 7-Eleven clerk’s heart to me as a consolation.
No, no vegan substitutes for me; it has to be flesh. Human flesh.
So, I feed, but just enough to keep me alive—well, not completely dead. And every time I do, I hate myself. Every time I bite into a skull, a little bit more of my soul dies.
“Brains!” Ralph’s voice pulled me from my grumpy vegan musings.
He closed his eyes and sniffed the air, turning his head to this side and that. Ralph had a much more developed sense of smell than I did. He could find a human finger in a pile of manure just using his nose. And when he did find it, he would not hesitate to pop it into his mouth. I know this from past experience.
He took off down the street ambling as quickly as he could. I followed behind him. It had become harder and harder to find food. As the number of the living undead grew, people began to take the recommended precautions.
We lurched through the streets for what seemed like forever, turning left and right like we were in a maze. Sometimes Ralph would pause to sniff, and then set off with renewed vigor—as much as you can muster when you don’t have a beating heart or blood pumping to help propel you forward.
Finally, I turned a corner and stopped in my limping tracks. There, lit up like the Eiffel Tower at night, was a shining, brand-new, organic grocery store. People poured in and out—white men with beards and skinny jeans, women in black-rimmed glasses and ironic 50s style dresses. We had walked into a neighborhood recently taken over by hipsters and yuppies. And they lived in such a protective bubble, they thought they were untouchable; none of them were taking any of the recommended anti-zombie precautions.
Ralph looked like a kid at Christmas. He shambled towards the loading docks in the back, keeping to the shadows. I decided I could use the element of surprise, and I moved to the most isolated poorly lit corner of the parking lot. I crouched down behind one of the countless Priuses.
I didn’t have to wait long until I heard movement. I poked my head up and saw a dark-haired white woman in a corduroy skirt and Birkenstocks juggling three cloth bags full of groceries—of course she had brought her own bags.
I waited until she was within arm’s length, and then darted forward quickly (for a zombie), grabbing her before she knew what happened.
She froze, stared at me with wide terrified eyes. Like a baby chick in a factory farm—right before they snap its beak and cut off its legs.
I tried not to look in her eyes. “This might not be much consolation, but I want to assure you I won’t enjoy this anymore than you will.”
Her look of terror mixed now with confusion.
Then I caught a whiff of her scent. I reeled. She smelled like granola and soy milk and rice crisps and organic bananas.
She was the most wonderful thing I had ever smelled in my life.
She smelled vegan. The first vegan I had encountered since I turned. She wasn’t compromising her principles. She was doing the right thing for her body, for the animals, for the Earth. You know the most destruction to the ozone layer comes not from pollution, but from cow farts? It’s true, the flatulence of cattle will destroy us all, but because everyone wants a burger, they just keep breeding more and more livestock.
This woman was above all of that. She was me, back when I had been able to do the right thing.
The closest approximation I could do of a smile split my face. I cracked her head open between my hands, and dove in with a gusto that would have made Ralph whistle if he could have. It was sweeter than soy ice cream and tastier than tofu cheesecake.
For the first time since I became a zombie, my conscience was blessed silent. I’d found a way to enjoy my zombie unlife to the fullest, without the wracking guilt. If I only ate vegans, essentially, I was still a vegan as well. You are what you eat, right?
Ralph shuffled over, fresh brain matter pancaked on his face like make up. He saw the empty skull, and I could tell he was impressed by my appetite. He gave me a thumbs up—which, since we don’t have much joint mobility, was just Ralph lifting his entire hand up sideways.
I burped, and patted my stomach contentedly as I stared at the hipsters moving like ants in and out of the light of the store. I sniffed. Three, four—make that five vegans, in less than a minute. If Ralph and I kept this a secret, only grabbed one or two at a time, there’s no telling how long it would take these people to figure out what’s going on. “Ralph, my friend, this is what Heaven looks like.”
Originally published in Speculating Futures: Black Imagination & the Arts Volume 42 (Obsidian, 2016)
