Rochelle Weidner | Author | My Life and Creative Work

I wished I could have asked my Daddy for advice but he was doing five to fifteen at David’s Hole and it was still another week till visiting time. It was trumped up charge, he told me, and publicly I agreed with him, but secretly I knew he was guilty as sin. The old reprobate never had a lick of sense. But I suppose I shouldn’t be too critical. It was prison that taught him about the Internet.

Zombies. Zombies.

To tell the truth, Lizzie as a Zombie was a bit of an improvement in the old girl. For the last thirty years or so, she was starting to wear on my nerves. I know I’d promised to love and obey till death did us part. But now I felt cheated. She was dead but she wasn’t. She didn’t talk quite so much anymore which was a blessing, I’m telling you. But she smelled worse than ever now and seemed determined that I join her nightly rambles. So you can see my predicament.

Course I found out pretty quick that I could outrun Lizzie and I could always outrun Grandma Elder when she was her live ornery self, but they both had a nasty habit of hiding in the outhouse. Naturally we didn’t use it no more, ever since Uncle Horton installed indoor plumbing, but it was startling when they came lunging out the door in the dead of night.

I’m sure that is how Lizzie got Grandma Elder. Granny was so suspicious of the indoor plumbing that she would sneak out to what she was familiar with when she thought we weren’t paying attention. One snap from Lizzie’s mean little mouth, and now she had Grandma for her permanent companion.

Somewhere there had to be a quick and easy method to get rid of a Zombie. I didn’t have the money to go to some island. As far as I knew, none of the locals practiced anything more heathen than Christian Science. I couldn’t figure for the life of me how Lizzie became a Zombie but I was less interested in how it happened than in getting rid of her. I reckoned I’d take care of Grandma later. There was no point in deviling Grandpa by sending her along to be his eternal companion.

But back to what I was doing. Silver bullets didn’t work. Garlic was for vampires and I was pretty sure Lizzie was a Zombie. Holy water wouldn’t do me no good. I’d seen the reverend pouring ordinary water into the baptismal. That water wasn’t holy just recycled.

An hour later, my head hurt something horrible. I hadn’t done so much reading since I’d had to pass my driver’s test. According to the Internet she was a slave now to someone, but I still couldn’t figure out who would want her.

It was some dude called a bokoo who’d taken Lizzie but I couldn’t figure what they would want with her. It all had to be a horrible mistake. Then I found what I was looking for. Salt. Salt was the answer. I had to get her to eat salt.

O.K., salt I could get, but how the hell do you get a Zombie to eat anything.

The clock in hall chimed three. I didn’t have much time before nightfall. In the kitchen I poured a half a tumbler of whiskey and sipped at it. It tasted salty. And it reminded me of something.

By nightfall I’d rigged my trap. It had to work. Old Lizzie never could turn down a drop of Daddy Elder’s moonshine. But it had been years since I’d visited the still, so I worried some on the way. Maybe it’d been found and destroyed, or taken over by some other family. There was lots of new people moving into the area. All that copper tubing was probably now in some yuppie’s living room holding up a coffee table.

But luck was with me. Stashed beneath a clump of lilacs were three jars of the Elderbest, containing the recipe that went with him to his grave.

I made it back across the top of the hill in record time, and had set up the jar of temptation between the outhouse and the front porch. I wanted to watch.

Sure enough just as the sun flattened out over the hills, Lizzie and Grandma Elder burst from the outhouse and started towards me. At first I worried that they wouldn’t see the jar. I’d laid it in a wheelbarrow where I was pretty sure they had clear sight of it. But Lizzie saw it first, and then Grandma Elder did. Old habits die hard, they say. And the two fussed and fought over who got the first swig. Lizzie won. Before Grandma Elder even got hers down, Lizzie was looking around wildly. With more energy than I’d seen in two weeks, she whirled around and headed south. Grandma was right on her heels.

The Baptist Hope Forever Cemetery was due south, and about a half mile as the crow flies. I wasn’t sure how fast two ghouls could travel, so I took my time following.

But by the time I arrived, it was done. There was a pile of dust on each grave. I waited another hour, but there was no sign of either of them. It was shame to salt good moonshine but it was worth it.

The next day at the county store I heard that some woman over in Cook’s county went up in a cloud of smoke. No one could quite figure out why, and folks were chatting about calling in a scientific investigation team. I picked up my butter, eggs, and 10-pack of floppy disks and headed out to the truck. She must have been the bokoo.