Suzette peeled the label from an empty bottle of sleeping pills, then rolled off her mattress and went to the living room. She touched a match to the kindling in her fireplace, watching the flames grow and flicker in the darkened windows. Shiksa and Ben-Gurion, her two ocelots, came from the room's chilly corners to join her. An October wind moaned in the roof, flashing, then whistled through the surrounding silage fields. She shivered, pulling on a cardigan before going to a window, where she gazed out upon a moonlit night, a crush of stars, and the rippling surface of an irrigation pond. Drifting in memory, she recalled an alfalfa field where she'd walked a fence line. There, shimmering in the windrows, tethered to alfalfa stubble, she'd found a child's party balloon. She'd brushed the soil from its surface, revealing a princess sitting in the window of a castle tower. She'd pressed the song button and listened as the princess decried the injustice of her imprisonment. The battery weakened, and the voice faded.
The pop of an exploding ember pulled her from her reverie. A star streaked across the sky. She touched the cool windowpane with her fingertips, then went to the kitchen, completing a chore she'd started earlier that evening--sponging copper cream on French cookware that she'd taken from overhead racks. She rinsed her hands, then walked through a hallway, passing empty bedrooms before reaching a staircase that led to the house's lower level, an L-shaped expanse with a library at one end and a home theater at the other. She locked the French doors and drew the curtain. Her ocelots came charging down the stairs. "Don't chase!" she yelled. They rolled into her legs with their combined weight of seventy pounds. "Oh, you little shitters!" she scolded. "Bad cats! Are those the kind of manners they teach in South America?"
She grabbed a duster from a utility closet and started along the garden-level windowsills. She pulled a ceremonial opening ribbon off the theater door. There was a playbill: The Postman Always Rings Twice. She slid the door open and rotated a dimmer switch. Sunset-colored light glowed in the recessed light fixtures. She sat in the back row in a luxurious leather chair, remembering the last conversation she'd had with her father, an interview she'd called the Silverman chronicles. She pressed a remote button, and Max's face appeared on the screen. "Tell me about yourself, dad."
But then Suzette heard a rhythmic tapping at the French doors. "What the fuck?" Ok, whatever this is, it's bad. She glanced at her watch. It was 6:24 a.m. Her closest neighbor was a half-mile off. She slipped past the theater's door, then stopped, listening, and watching. Shiksa and Ben-Gurion crouched low and paced the room with wide eyes. She started for the gun vault, slipping past the French doors and up the stairs taking two at a clip. Pulling a Desert Eagle from the vault, Suzette yanked the slide back, chambering a stupidly large round into the breach. She went to a back window and then pulled back the shade to see the patio. A feather could've knocked her over when our girl saw her brother, Ray, standing barefoot in the moonlight, wearing the suit he'd been buried in three months before. She knew better than to accept it, but her heart swelled with momentary joy. It'd all been a twisted mistake! She flew down the stairs, slapping up the patio light switch, throwing the bolt back, and pushing the doors open. The gun slipped from her hand, discharging as it hit the floor. The undertaker's putty had come off Ray's face, revealing the gruesome injuries he'd suffered in the crash. She pushed down her revulsion, then stepped back, holding her ground while Ray moved stiffly past her and let out a horrifying wail that sounded like a car crash with the shattering of the windshields and the clang of the axles breaking apart. He stank horribly, and his face was sunken and bloated simultaneously. His lips were the leather of his desiccation. Ray was a fucking zombie, and Suzette had a problem. He went to the library, to his baby grand piano, shutting the door behind him. Ok, thought Suzette.
She sat in a chair next to the library door and trembled as Ray played a sonata on the keyboard.
"Jesus, Ray, you're dead as fuck, but you're still family."
She pushed the library door open.
"Can I do anything for you?"
Ray snapped his jaws as an annoyed dog might do at flies.
"I don't know what that means, Ray."
He pushed a fist into his mouth and started grunting.
"Oh, it's about food. I get it. We've still got those emotional support rabbits you used to raise. They're out in the hutch."
After tossing Ray a rabbit and listening to the racket he made chasing it around, Suzette decided she needed a bath.
"Stay put, Ray; we'll figure this out tomorrow, ok?"
She went upstairs to the main bedroom, filled the jet tub, then went to the walk-in closet and stripped in front of a full-length mirror. She turned sideways, admiring the heft of her tits and the rest of her toned, five-foot eleven-inch body. Shiksa and Ben-Gurion pressed against her legs and touched their noses to her kneecaps. "No, you don't; that gives me goosebumps." She pinned up her red hair and then went to the tub.
A week went by.
Suzette was out of support rabbits. Ray had also gobbled up twenty of her game hens. She was doing everything she could, but he was voracious. He devoured anything he could chew. Dead, alive, rotten, it didn't matter so long as he could sink his teeth into it. The cleanup was hell, primarily because of the zombie shit. A lumpy, decaying, undigested mash spilled out of him, often containing knots of hair and eyeballs that had missed mastication. She'd put plastic sheeting on the floor to catch the gore. Every couple of days, she'd gone in, first yelling him into a corner, then rolling up the plastic along with the feathers and fur, the roadkill paws. She'd replace the plastic sheeting, then use a shop-vac for any overspill. "Get the fuck back, Ray, back!" she'd yell. But then she'd feel horrible for mistreating him. He didn't have language anymore; she wasn't sure he even understood her, but she spoke to him as though he did.
She stood in the kitchen tapping her nails on the granite counter. Where would she get Ray's next meal? She went to the den and glanced out a window where her one-hundred-yard driveway intersected with County Road 5. It was a hazy morning, and the fence lines running along the driveway had another windstorm's tumbleweeds. She made a mental note to get a burn permit and then started out the front door on her way to the mailbox, but Cutie Niels was slowly walking along Road 5.
Suzette changed directions, heading for the toolshed where she thought to hide until Cutie was down the road. But Cutie Niels had already spotted her and was waving. Suzette decided to let it play out. She started down the driveway as Cutie leaned her fat body on the mailbox, scratching her ass and smacking her lips salaciously while admiring the swing of Suzette's hips. Cutie's upper lip had wiry hairs. Her mouth was wet in the corners, and she had a skin disorder, little bumps just under the skin that made Suzette think of spider eggs in barn corners.
"Expecting a box today, Suzette? You get boxes almost every day, isn't that so? It's no wonder that a pretty thing like you gets all the things she wants."
"I don't know what you mean," said Suzette, stepping up to the mailbox and yanking the lid open.
"I'll bet those delivery boys get ideas about you." With that, Cutie laughed and wheezed until a tear dripped from one of her eyes. "Oh, God," she coughed, "I wish I had your backside. You're built just like a young mare. I get warm as toast just from looking. I swing both ways, honeypot, but nobody wants me on account of my years."
"I have to go."
"Did I see you collecting roadkill a couple of days back? Strange."
