Madeline Vosch

Zombie Trouble

We hunger. This is the first thing we know of each other; this is how we know each other. The dull sheen in our eyes, the dark circles in our faces. Our bodies decaying. The rot spreading. 

When they can, when they see us for what we are, they put us away where they can’t see us. Where we can’t contaminate them. We make people uncomfortable. Our limbs, their points, their curves. Our elbows like knives. The hollows where our eyes should be. How we shiver, even in the sun. Our hair is cracked and frayed, splitting at every end. We are things to be fixed by them, to be made into what they want us to be. Proper. They want us to be nameable. They want to make us like them, as if they did not make us how we are to begin with. 

They put some of us in hospitals, locked away. They monitor how we spend our days. They weigh our food, dole out portions they have measured for us. Oatmeal, yogurt, sterilized fruits. They make us sick, but they don’t let us leave the table until we have finished what they give us. They take us to doctors, men in white robes who do not know what to make of us, what questions to ask. They look at their phones and look at us and do not think we fit their definitions of what we should be. They download apps—to prompt the right questions, to best diagnose us, to medicate and prod and fix us. 

They open the doors to locked wards, and we stumble out, jerking and full. Our fingernails fall off when we talk. 

We are not supposed to keep living, but we do, and we do, and they can’t decide what to do with us. Those of us who look like what they think we should look like, our ribs poking through our skin, cheeks caved inward, eyes bulging, we with fragile bones, they make examples of us. They pay attention, they surveil our movements, our mouths. Those of us who blend in, whose bodies look like theirs, whose hunger is invisible because they mistake us for them, they don’t pay us any attention. Ignored, among them, we walk. But we, we know our own. 

Sometimes, one of us will spot another in a school cafeteria, will watch what is or is not on the plastic tray, what does or does not pass cracked lips. Some of us sneak into grocery stores unnoticed, alone, slip pill bottles into our pockets, bright blue electric things that shock us awake, shock us unhungry. The pills dry out our insides, make our hearts beat with a twist. We hide the pills where no one can see, buried in underwear drawers. In the heat of summer, we sit outside sweating. Thick drops of sweat wash things out of our bodies, and we pray Yes. 

We monsters, hidden among crowds. 

Our nailbeds are scabbing. 

They think that we all look one way, that we are all the same color, that we are all the same shape. An illness of the wealthy, the white, the women, they say. A gilded cage, they call it. They don’t understand that we are everyone, but we, we know each other. 

We live in large houses, we live in trailer parks. We live near where the train comes shrieking through town. We live in fifth-floor walk-ups, at the ends of gravel roads. We live in places where the trees are spaced far apart, where the cicadas sing in the summer. We are everywhere, invisible, unseen until we are a problem. 

Together we crowd into bathrooms, close the door behind us. In basements that smell like mold and wet, growing things, we take off our clothes, throw them in a pile near the place on the floor where the bugs get in. We look at each other, compare our flesh. We envy. We measure. We scale. Our numbers, our selves. Less, we grunt. Less. 

We want. We stumble through streets moaning for more, for what we will not allow ourselves. We contradict ourselves. We refuse the hunger that gnaws at us from dawn hours to midnight silence. It wakes us in our sleep, the pangs. It keeps us alert when night falls. 

When we die young, they say it is our own fault, as if we weren’t doing the things they told us to. They tell us to take up less space, to eat less, to be less, that our bodies are our worth, that we must discipline ourselves. They show us new diets, new slimming recipes, new workouts to melt our bodies, and then they gawk at the silent spectacles of our sallow skin when we do what they say. 

We mix their messages. Crafted for mass consumption, we abstain. We defy their prescriptions. We consume our own flesh. 

At night, we crawl upstairs. We sit in front of televisions. We are all that we have. We keep our secrets, protect each other when we can. We protect each other from their institutions, where they would make us into proper beings, where they do not care about helping or healing, where they only want to make us better to look at. They want to lock us up until we no longer remind them of the messages they gave us.

Some of us make up new vocabularies. In rooms full of them we mutter fresh phrases, intermittent fasting, we say, smiling to each other under the words. We know our language. 

Some of us do not speak in public. We text one another in daily sacraments. Confess our sins. Is this too much? Absolve each other. No, no, I feel the same way. Sick with envy of the things we can’t have. Sick with hate at the things we do. 

We wait for them to see us as we are, as we see ourselves. 

Our bodies, wild with bones. 

Half-dead, we live. Alone, in hordes, we wander. We hunt for what will cure the problem of ourselves. 

Our jaws fall open, empty, aching, hungry.

Madeline Vosch writes fiction and essays, and is currently working on a memoir. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Offing, and Heavy Feather Review, among others. She is the 2021 winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Contest in Nonfiction and was an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow.