This morning, Kaye will drink black coffee and eat a banana while she reads the last two chapters of her novel on the back porch overlooking her vegetable garden.
Later tonight, she will be fucked senseless by a member of the living dead.
She joined the cult in early Spring, although she wouldn't have called it that at the time. Back then, she would have said it was a community of like souls or something of the sort. They gathered at a train station not far from Kaye's house. They never proselytized, but Kaye always knew them by the way they dressed: all of the men in dark trench-coats, black slacks, and white button downs, all of the women in pale smock-frocks with bow collars. They seemed like ghosts wandering around, lost in a time they didn't belong to. Whenever she passed them waiting for their bus (always the same line: the Route 43 to Harlowe), she couldn't help but look at them up and down. Soon enough, they started looking back.
One day, she was reapplying make-up in the restroom alone when a member of the cult came in. She stood in the corner of Kaye's eye, waiting to catch her attention. Her dark brown eyes met with Kaye's, a sort of knowing look in them and in the woman's eerily pretty smile. Without a word, she lifted the hem of her smock-frock to reveal she was completely naked beneath apart from a complicated-looking criss-crossing of red silk rope.
Later on, Kaye would learn the name for this "rope dress": hishi karada, a form of Japanese bondage. The woman was wearing the diamond pattern -- a simple, elegant knot.