Micro fiction by LM Fontanes

Undead

Hi John, not that your name is John but in case someone ever finds this, plausible deniability that I didn’t destroy your life even though I might have. Maybe destroy is harsh. Also, maybe your life or, no, our life together needed to be destroyed. It’s funny how life can keep going like a zombie that hasn’t tasted salt. That’s what happens when you give salt to resurrected corpses. They remember they’re dead and return to their graves. At least, that’s what I recall from Caribbean horror stories I devoured in college. If Daddy knew I’d been reading those, he would’ve dragged me to Confession in his lumbering Pontiac. I once asked about the power of island curses and his veiny brown hand flew to the scapular under his Sears & Roebuck undershirt. I still have that ancient badge of faith—plastic cracked over Jesus and His Sacred Heart—but I no longer have Daddy or you, John. No zombies involved.

Or wait. Maybe I’ve got this wrong. Maybe it wasn’t us, maybe it was me. I remember the So Cal night I slashed our Navajo White walls with my hunger. How I stayed out until past the owl’s hunting time in the company of someone not you. Later, in the baleful canyon beyond our condo door, I thought I heard something shriek. You never see the raptor coming. It must be better that way, John. 

In the morning, I licked salt from the mirror and remembered I was alive.