Zombie Training

“Be ready, son,” my father would always tell me, growing up. “The zombie apocalypse could happen at any time.”

All fathers have their obsessions. Sports. Model trains. Grilling. His was zombies. At bed time, he would tell me stories of people planning and surviving, or not planning and dying, stories of people keeping a level head and surviving and people panicking and dying. Every night, he would give me the adventures of Goofus and Gallant: Undead Nightmare edition. While other boys' dads taught them to catch a ball, mine taught me to make a headshot from fifty yards with a pull string, compound, composite, and cross bow. He taught me wilderness survival and took me camping the way many fathers in rural areas did, but the advice was different. Sleep in a tree so Zed can't get you. Walk in the stream so Zed can smell you. Don't use guns unless you have to. Guns are loud, and will attract Zed.

At seven, just in case, he gave me an air pistol and would randomly stick targets in unexpected places to keep me on my toes, and at ten, he gave me a real pistol, taught me to shoot just in case (a bow simply will not do you any good within striking distance). I learned to strip and clean my gun blind, learned to make my own ammo. My friends called him weird. So did I when I hit my teens.

But to this day, every time I step outside the cabin and put an arrow through one of their heads before I even consciously realize one was shambling toward me, I say a little prayer of thanks for everything he taught me.

- Originally mailed to P. Walker in Diamondhead, Mississippi

Swamp People

I followed her down the muddy path that traced its winding path from the back country road to the swamp. It twisted like a snake through the woods so much I had no way of knowing which way I faced or which way led back to my car. I did not care, though. When I saw her standing by the road, her slip the color of bone in the shadows, I had to follow her. Not to help her, mind you, though she did look every inch the damsel in distress the little girl lost in the woods. No, not to help her, but to help me. If I just went with her, my every wish would be granted. She never said this aloud. Something in those mournful eyes told me everything I ever wanted, desires I never knew I had that now stirred deep within, all could be mine if I just went with her, down into the swamps. So I did.

Now I stand barefoot beside back country roads, wearing jeans and a shirt the color of bone, and with my deep mournful eyes, I promise travelers everything their heart desires if they but follow me along winding paths down into the swamps.

- Originally mailed to C. George in San Diego, California

Ghost Church

There is a small country church that only appears when it is raining. To say where this church is, however, is impossible except to say down lonely roads wherever it is raining, for indeed people have reported seeing the church in countless cities spanning several continents on the same day, perhaps during the same storm. There are those who say that it is a ghost church whose congregation of the dead and the damned beckons new parishioners to join them. They say the church is atoning eternally for some past sin. Perhaps. Who can say with certainty, for if legend is to be believed, none who enter are ever seen again to tell tale of the sermon. Of course, legends have a tendency to exaggerate, and if the church truly does appear all over the world, it would not be impossible for a man to enter in Topeka, Kansas and step out in the Amazon rain forest, and how should he get home then? He has not been taken by the ghostly church, but the difference is semantic to those back home. Then there are those who dare to wonder where the church's inhabitants go when the rain stops. To this, I say, I do not know, but it is always raining somewhere, so should you find yourself in a strange church on a rainy day, rest assured that if you step outside after the sermon and find your are not in Kansas anymore, you may at least take comfort in the fact that you are not lost forever, but merely misplaced for the time being.

- Originally mailed to D. Garner from Biloxi, Mississippi

Bathroom Ghost

 

All my life, I've had an irrational fear of bathrooms. Once I wondered if perhaps it was religious in nature. After all, we're trained from birth to be ashamed of nudity and anything involving a toilet. Upon closer inspection, I realized that couldn't be the case. I didn't have an issue relieving myself in the woods and there I had no walls for privacy. No, my specific fear was ghosts in the bathroom, no doubt a result of countless horror movies. Bathrooms in horror movies are always grim, terrifying affairs with rusty pipes and flickering florescent bulbs that wash out all colors but blue and gray. For years, I convinced myself that this was an irrational fear, that while doing my business, I didn't need to cast my eyes about at every sound, peering deeply at every shadow, begging it not to move.

A year ago, as I finished bathing I found myself staring down a ghost, a skeleton hanging there in the shower where I had been only seconds ago. I trembled in terror. All of my fears, all those years of worry. They had been justified. How long had that ghost been there, I wondered in horror. Did he only now manifest, or had he been in the shower with me, my eyes too full of suds to realize. Did he see me? Had this suicidal skeleton been watching me? Only then did I realize the true nature of my fear. Maybe it wasn't the ghosts at all. Maybe all this time it was just the fear of someone walking in on me.

- Originally mailed to L. Sims in Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Talking Salad

Oscar Wilde once said “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.” For many, this is much hoped for money that is inherited from a lost loved one or a job that creates more problems than it solves. For one vegetarian animal rights activist, the gods had bigger plans. She would pray at night that the savages of the world would understand the suffering their food endured before reaching its plate. In the morning, her soy latte bemoaned the pain of being ground and boiled and her salad lunch cried at the agonies of being ripped from the mother vine and hacked to bits while still fresh and alive. By dinner, her perspective on food had completely changed. She would eat only nuts and fruit that had fallen from the tree, and of course meat she killed herself, the free range cow having had a fair chance to fight back.

- Originally mailed to K. Ballard of Owensborough, Kentucky

Dubstep Demon

Grimnok was without a doubt the most garish demon to walk the earth in as long as anyone could remember and the whole neon spots and bright red horns had the worst habit of attracting woo girls when he had serious damnation business to be doing. A demon ought to be feared and respected, he would bemoan, not cuddled upon while friends took pictures. They should be groveling at his feet in terror begging for their lives, or at their very least offering up their souls. Oh sure, at first he delighted in their presence, with their cheers for hand grenades and hurricanes and Bloody Mary. He thought them beings of indescribable carnage, but oh how his heart sank when he learned the only thing they intended to punish were their livers. Soon, they would rue the day they thought him a mere “party monster.” But before he could enact his vengeance, he would need to fortify his resolve with at least six more jell-o shots and a few hours dancing to some really rockin' dubstep.

 - Originally mailed to J. Hall of Jackson, Mississippi

Knitted Cthulhu

 Among scholars of the necronomicon, there is a great debate as to the true nature of the great old one Cthulhu. Some said he was a giant from beyond space, capable of devouring worlds. Others claimed he slumbered beneath the seas. There were camps that said he had bulbous yellow eyes the shone like the fires of hell and some said they were like a man's eyes but for the inhuman emptiness behind them and others claimed he had no eyes at all. None disagreed, however, that to look upon him guaranteed a man lose his sanity. On the evening of November the twenty-seventh, 1932, Nicholas Watkins forswore reason and dared to summon Cthulhu that he might say with certainty what the dread god looked like. When he later told his peers that the endless lord was a tiny fellow of knitted blue wool with button eyes and red cap, they knew he had glimpsed Cthulhu, for he had clearly been driven quite mad.

- Originally mailed to J. Witten in Oxford, Mississippi