Last night I dreamed I loved a zombie.....the details are sketchy, but I am trying to recreate the images in my mind as I type....
A man died. He was buried. I dug him up and placed him in a device that held him lying face down, yet suspended about four feet off the ground. Like one of those massage tables, but it was a homemade wooden contraption that could have been an instrument of torture if the person in it were alive. His arms dangled down.
We were in a daycare center, and the little children, ages 3-6 or so, were attempting to climb under, over, and on the dead man. I tried in vain to keep them off, horrified as they played with his limp bloody arms under the table, and reached out to touch his rotting feet. I lay underneath him and looked up at his disfigured face, defending the defenseless.
Later, he was sitting up in a chair, and when I looked over at him, he reminded me of the time I was in Zunil, Guatemala, in a dark room with an effigy of San Simon and all the colorfully-dressed locals around offering him cigars and whiskey in a room full of lighted candles. Suddenly I knew there was some life left in him. I watched and waited. The pesky pre-schoolers were gone. Soon, one eye opened, then another, and he looked at me.
I knew he had returned from the dead to be with me forever. I watched as he stretched his limbs, and I crawled up to recline beside him. He was bigger than a normal man, like the size I imagine Frankenstein's creature to be - human, but just on a larger, grotesquer scale. We snuggled on the chair, and I wrapped my left arm over his chest, feeling for the heartbeat that had returned. He took my hand and moved it to his crotch, and I felt the warmth and life there also, as if he needed that sensation to prove to himself that he was, indeed, alive. The thought of a zombie's penis kind of creeped me out, like it was delicate and might fall off if I handled it too aggressively. I removed my hand, put my head on his chest, and wanted to sleep. He never said a word. Neither did I.
2 comments:
There's life after the children go off to college, perhaps?
I like it best when they don't talk much....
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