Undead Ghoul Meet-Cute
byKENDARE BLAKE
“MARY, MARY, QUITE CONTRARY,how does your garden grow?”
Not terribly well, to be honest. But then, it wasn’t meant to.
And her name wasn’t Mary either; it was Maria. Maria Havemeier, or at least it had been when she was alive.
She bent down over the garden, which was less a garden than three short rows of mounded dirt and upturned stones in the middle of a budding spring forest. So, in the middle of nowhere. In another month, the trees overhead would be full of leaves and casting shade, too much shade for anything to sprout besides the ferns, or maybe the hostas that her grandmother had liked to plant beside their house. Grandma was dead, too. But at least she was deadand buried, safe in the ground. Not dead and bent over it, hacking away with a hoe.
Maria thought about that all the time. Her grandmother, lying in her Sunday dress, arms folded over her chest and snuggled in her casket beneath the cool, cool dirt. It must be nice. Not that Maria would have been able to feel the coolness—dead bodies didn’t feel much at all except for very, very hungry—but she could have lain down with Gram at least, and talked to her, and told her she was okay.
She wasn’t okay, but why worry Gram? It’s not like there was anything she could do to help.
Maria stopped working with the hoe to stretch her back, more out of habit than tiredness. She’d managed to make a nice hole in the nearest row, a good ten inches deep. It was even more impressive when she considered the crude tool she’d been using. What the hell was a hoe good for anyway? But that’s what she’d been able to grab in the abandoned shed three months ago, and since then she’d been too focused on what she was doing to bother going back. She should have, maybe. For a shovel. Or even a handheld spade. You know, something that could actually dig.
Oh well. Maybe next time. Except after today, there would be no next time. She glanced down at the messenger bag near her right foot, the khaki canvas covered with dark stains, the lower left corner wet from the most recent one still leaking inside. She looked down at it and narrowed her eyes, resisted the urge to punt it between the nearest two trees and scream, “Goal!”
Then she bent back down and got back to work.
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockleshells and a bunch of severed heads and stuff.”
She swung the hoe a little too hard and the sharp corner sank deep into one of the rounded mounds of dirt and stuck fast, probably wedged into an eye socket or one of the skull fractures.
“Oops,” she said.
“Oops?” came a boy’s voice, muffled from inside the bag. “What do you mean, ‘oops’?”
“What do you care?” she asked. “You’re a head. I’d say there aren’t any more ‘oops’ to be had, as far as you’re concerned.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said the bag, or rather, the head in the bag, but seeing it move almost made her laugh. It was like watching a very disturbing sock puppet. “But, say, would you mind opening up the flap and giving me a look around?”
“What?”
“Just to see where I’ll be resting. Before the dirt goes in and it’s lights out. Like a last request.”
Maria knelt and cleared the last of the dirt away from the hole. There were six other mounds in her little garden, each containing the severed head and crushed skull of a ghoul. A ghoul, like she was. An undead body that refused to lie down and rot, and instead went on about their business almost like a live person. Except that live people didn’t constantly hunger for dead, rotting human flesh.
“How long have you been dead?” she asked.
“About six months.”
Six months. Almost the same as her.
“Then six months ago was when you should have asked for last requests,” she said.
Six months ago she’d been in a cemetery, saying goodbye to her grandmother. Leaving flowers and saying prayers and the whole bit. Six months ago she’d been alive, until she saw a boy hunched over a grave at the edge by the trees, weeping.
He was alone, like she was. Sad, like she was. Probably scared, like she was, even though she knew how to take care of herself, so she went over to him and placed her hand on his shoulder.
She expected to be rebuffed. Or for him to simply go on crying. What she hadn’t expected was for him to spin around like a dog surprised at his dinner bowl and bite her.
He’d bitten her deep. So fast she didn’t even have time to scream, and then he ran off into the trees even faster. But Maria never forgot his face.
She’d searched for it every night, in every cemetery she could find, for the last three months. She’d run into six other ghouls that hadn’t been him: one for each of her tidy dirt mounds. And then last night she finally got lucky. Lucky number seven. The one who’d damned her and turned her into thisthing.
“Pretty maids all in a row,” she said, and tossed the hoe to one side. In the past she’d used it to crack open the ghouls’skulls before she’d buried them (so she guessed the hoe really was good for something), but this time it was personal. This time she’d use her boot.
