Everything Is Better with Zombies

by Hannah Wolf Bowen

“You don’t know that she’s a zombie,” Lion says as we walk our bikes back up Salt Hill. The side that sweeps down to the cemetery is steep and we’ve no momentum to carry us up. Instead, we’ll trudge to the top of the hill and remount there to go zipping down. “She could be a ghoul or a ghost or a skeleton. We could’ve made her up.”

“You saw the footprint,” I remind him. “We didn’t make her up.” We’d followed the trail to the highway. We’d paced along the shoulder, searching for the spot where she’d stepped back off the pavement. We hadn’t found anything. But even Lion had agreed that the print by the creek was beautifully clear. “And if she’d been a skeleton, it would have just been bone. And ghosts wouldn’t leave any prints at all.”

“They might,” Lion says, “if they were acting out their deaths.”