Zombies are real, I can attest to it.  I walked with one.  And also lived with, talked with and screamed at one although I didn’t eat with a zombie because just like the movie version, the real thing isn’t interested in food. 

The only thing Hollywood gets right is the look.  The fictional zombie and the real kind are in a state of decomposition.  In the movies zombies can’t speak or think. My zombie could and did talk; in fact the words, cunning yet soothing rolled off her tongue like quicksilver. I longed to hear them.  I allowed them to penetrate my skull and they easily crossed the blood-brain barrier, accumulating in my gray matter and causing all kinds of neurological problems.  Sometime I felt mad as a hatter.  Other times it seemed as though my mind was packed in cotton.

The movie version is physically clumsy and doesn’t need sleep but mine could bounce around like an enraged cat and at other times sleep like the dead.  Sometimes she’d nod off sitting stock-straight in her chair, at the dinner table, finger frozen in the air as she attempted to make a point.  Mid-sentence.

It took me a while to figure out what she was.  No one wants to believe they’ve been harboring the undead.  It doesn’t look or sound good. 

“Yeah, I’ve got a zombie in my house.  But your kids can still come over and play; it mostly stays in its room.”

A person becomes adept at making excuses to herself and to others. 

One day the fog shrouding my brain cleared long enough for me kick in her bedroom door while she was out and then I knew.  Death and decay were heaped everywhere and by the looks of things, had been for a long time.

I scooped up armfuls of filthy sheets and clothes, tossed them in the air and then watched in fascination as used needles rained down.  And spoons, blackened spoons – so that’s why I could never find one! – on the scorched carpet, under the bed, the sheet-free mattress disgusting and covered in burn holes, lying among the dried vomit and other unidentifiable mounds of things I didn’t examine too closely.  Besides, there were other things to look at, like the tightly rolled lengths of Saran Wrap that looked like anorexic pigment-free snakes.  It could be only one thing (later she confirmed it); her own clever invention with which to tie off.

My brain finally felt clear.  The more I saw, the more I looked.

Where were the college textbooks I’d given her several hundred dollars to buy?  When I’d ask to see them, she told me they were in her room and she was always too busy to get them. 

Where was her brother’s laptop, the one she’d borrowed and kept promising to bring downstairs but never did.

In a frenzy, I yanked open every dresser drawer and the closet doors.  Turned her wooden jewelry box upside down, then threw it across the room with enough force that it tore a hole in the drywall.

Where was her jewelry?  Where were her clothes?  Her shoes.  Her stuff.  There was almost nothing left.

I forced myself away from the horror in that room and ran through my house.  Where were all my son’s video games, the ones he complained he couldn’t find even though he kept them neatly in a basket. 

“He’s irresponsible,” she said lightly when I asked her if she had any idea where they might be.  “You shouldn’t buy him expensive games.  Teach him a lesson.”

Music CDs and movies we could never seem to find, my kids’ hand-held game systems, small electronics, books, lots of books.  Where were they?  The house wasn’t that big.

“You people are so careless,” she said disdainfully when I’d asked her once about something I couldn’t find.  “Look harder.”

I was finally taking her advice.

My younger kids had recently gotten expensive game systems as gifts and I flew down to the basement.  Both were gone.  It seemed everywhere I turned, there were missing things.

At 2 a.m. she came home to what looked like a strange storm, one that had targeted only my house.  My front yard was covered in anything that was hers. 

Throwing her out was easy.  Keeping her out was harder because she tried to come back, for more.  And I was finally scared.  At night we had a ritual; make sure the windows were locked.  Prop chairs under all the doors.  If I wasn’t home and she came by, my kids were forbidden to talk to her; I told them to call me or 911.  But they loved her and missed her and they’d let her in.

A movie zombie is a crude, laughable creature.  Typically, zombification occurs via a bite from another zombie.  The real thing is sly and so much more dangerous.  It chooses to become and stay what it is.  It also gives off something invisible that infects those around it because they change too. Often they do and say crazy, incomprehensible things.  

In the movies there’s no recovery; the poor thing is doomed.  In real life that’s not the case and fortunately my daughter took the cure.  But the memories linger.

I remember when I slapped her across the face at two in the morning and told her I never wanted to see her again as her little brother and sister stood on the front porch, wailing and begging me not do what I was doing. I remember telling her I wished I'd had an abortion.

I’ll never forget the dead sub-human look in her eyes as she stared back at me for a moment then shrugged, got in her boyfriend’s idling car and drove out of our lives for a long time without even a backward glance at the two little ones who were screaming her name from the porch.

That’s when I knew without a doubt, zombies are real.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcGb24n9hvM