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The tedium is the worst thing. It’s a killer.
You lurch around, night in, night out, with the same damned crowd, such an ugly looking lot and poor conversationalists to boot.
I generally hang out with Cedric the Composer. I suppose I’d call him my best friend. He keeps humming, on a loop, five bars of his Unfinished Symphony, a melancholy little ditty but at least a change from the usual drawn out, cacophonic, moaning and groaning. Thomas I avoid like the plague. His gouged-out eye, fleshless skull and flapping, tattered breeches which on breezy nights reveal the black buboes on his groin… And his table manners – the way he tears and gobbles flesh-appalling! Cedric preaches tolerance “What do you expect, of course he’s hideous… been around since 1665. He’s a class F, after all.”
Let me explain. I, being dead fresh, like some glassy-eyed mackerel on a fishmonger’s slab, am classed as A, the highest rating in this degenerate tribe.
Always fastidious about my appearance, I am proud to still possess two eyes, a nose, a mouth and a neck that doesn’t loll around hideously like most of them. A silk cravat, now coloured red, is tightly wound around my neck in a raffish bow. My shoes, Italian leather soles, have not worn well. Endless nightly processions remind of that holiday in Rimini; replete with pasta, my love and I would stroll along the shops buying trinkets, choosing ice-cream…
Ah, to turn back time! To chose a different path in death! That last pint in the Boar’s Head, that last homeward stagger through the graveyard…
I saw her there, a wan, ethereal beauty in a diaphanous gown, a pale arm draped artlessly over a gravestone. “Looking for love?” she enquired, beckoning me with her elongated finger. My arm around her slender waist, she leaned towards my neck. I caught a certain whiff, wild garlic hereabouts, I erroneously surmised. Focusing my gaze, I grasped romantically for her hand- it wasn’t there.
She murmured, ’love bite?’
She wasn’t kidding!
Her fangs sank in and tore a lump of flesh and sinew from my neck. I would have screamed, had I the wherewithal. At break of dawn the sun’s rays struck her. She yelped and was away, leaving me bereft of life and vocal chords. Eagerly I wished for morning. Nevermore!
A zombie’s life is not a happy one.
Like bats we play sardines in darkened tombs. The last shafts of daylight recede. Here we go again, the same routine night in, night out.
Most people yearn for eternal life. Here there is no victory. Just endless groundhog days.
Oh death, where is thy sting?
About Helen Griffiths
Helen Griffiths, a Welsh - speaker, lives in Hampshire and works as a PA. Her BA in French and German from The University of Wales, Aberystwyth, was recently followed by an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Winchester. She has had historical and travel articles published and short stories long-listed and short-listed in regional writing competitions, winning on one occasion. Flash fiction, Dead Fresh, was published in Litro. She is currently writing her first novel.
