Halloween was their favorite time of year because it was when they got to leave the basement. Technically, they only knew it was Halloween because the Man and the Boy came and carried them up the stairs. When they were born (of course technically they were undead, but what felt like birth to them: when they emerged from their boxes and were brought out onto the porch for the first time) they’d just assumed that “life” was always going to be that way. The porch was so beautiful, of course they wanted to stay there! The beautiful expanse of lawn, the other houses, the cross streets with exciting passing cars, trees with green, red and gold leaves, these were some of their first sights.
Along with the others zombies. Well hello! Here were a whole bunch them with the same moldering skin, bulging eyes, limbs falling off — sometimes an arm (ArghZombie), sometimes an ear (EarZombie), HeadlessZombie even had his entire head under his arm (“You know, technically I do still have my head,” he liked to point out whenever they used the name they’d given him). They’d each thought they were the only one when they first emerged from their boxes, but lo and behold, there were…well, nobody could count, so just a lot!, in this one area of the porch.
And there were several other types of beings in the other sections — and there were many, because it was a massive porch, compared to the other houses around them. Most of those beings also appeared to be some kind of undead, but they didn’t have the grayish-green skin tone and tended to be, well, heftier (not to size-shame, but it was just a fact that all of the zombies were pleasantly slender), plus they didn’t make the kind of groan-growl (Groanowl? Growan? They’d tried to come up with a word) that the zombies considered their thing. For instance, on the next part of the porch over from theirs, there was a different group, all with fiery, manic red wigs and brightly-painted white faces with huge red smiles, who appeared not to be decaying at all and laughed and screeched instead of moaning, who they eventually learned to call “creepy clowns,” after hearing a passerby call them that. At first, the clowns seemed to want to make friends, and invited the zombies to come over to their area for coffee, but when OohZombie tried to take them up on the offer and head over there, she realized that her legs didn’t move. Her arm with the pointing finger moved up and down, but the other appendages just hung, useless, clearly only for decoration rather than utility, and as she shook with the effort, the clowns all laughed (well, they were always laughing, but this time was clearly a cruel reaction to her predicament). So the zombies all stopped talking to the clowns, in a spirit of both solidarity and self-preservation. The ghoul kids on the other side were nicer, if a little weird. They were small, with high voices and very pale skin, and some did looked a bit decayed, but without parts falling off. They were all constantly “playing” on a seesaw or swings, from which they appeared to be taking maniacal enjoyment — and some certainly were, cackling and so on, but others confided in private moments that they felt peer pressure to act like they were having fun when they really would rather have been quietly off by themselves picking flowers, or discussing why the Man, in his infinite wisdom, had placed them there (Were they alive? Were they dead? Why were they endlessly expected to laugh without mirth and “play” with no purpose?). And then there was the long-haired, skeletal woman perched on the wall (but again, not grey, so also not a zombie), Aaaahahahaha. At first they envied her, the way her head would startlingly pop up from time to time as she screalaughed (also not quite the right word), flashing and her red eyes — it visibly scared the shit out of everyone who came by. But when BlahZombie started talking to her, they found out that this feat wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, because her head often got stuck in the up or down position, and once it even tore something and lolled somewhere in between, so that the Man had to come and fix her.
“That was a horrible day,” she whispered. “I heard him say that if this kept happening, he’d have to get rid of me.”
Word of this spread quickly around the porch, making even the clowns stop laughing for a while. It was the first season, and it had never occurred to any of them that this was a possibility. Imagine realizing that you hadn’t been built to last, that you were not only not, in fact, undead, but in essence, disposable.
And it turned out to be true. After they were all taken inside and brought to the basement for that first, endless period they spent there — none of them had much experience with time aside from the whole day/night thing, and it was night pretty much all the time down there, except for when the Woman or Boy came down to get the box of Christmas decorations or the folding chairs — when they re-emerged, at last, on to the porch, Aaaahahahaha wasn’t with them. Neither was Raaar, the werewolf who’d impressed them all with the way he’d be able to move his arms not just up and down, but also from side to side. They never saw either of them again. EeeeZombie claimed she saw some hairy limbs sticking out of one of the garbage bins that the Man brought to the curb by the driveway every week, but they didn’t know whether that was good information because she only had one functional eye and only turned her head that way for a few seconds at a time, and nobody else faced in that direction to verify (there was the one girl ghoul whose head spun all the way around, but she was always dizzy and couldn’t keep track of where anything was). Then when EeeeZombie disappeared the following year, BobZombie, who was relatively new and therefore, he claimed, not subject to their “naive sheeple groupthink,” said that it was because she knew too much. But he also thought that the Man wasn’t really a man at all but a creepy clown who’d covered his clown make-up with people make-up to conceal his identity, which the other zombies all agreed was a bit out there. Plus, his paranoia could have been driven by the fact that he was so fragile he didn’t make it through an entire season (although, to be fair, it was very, very windy that year). So, in short, nobody knew where the disappeared ones went, but what they did know was, once they were gone, they were gone forever. After a while, the turnover just became a way of…whatever this was.
Then one year, there was a major reshuffling that gave them all new places on the porch. The squealing pigs got a whole section to themselves at the front of the house, which the zombies didn’t think was very fair considering they’d only just showed up two seasons ago, and were pigs even convincingly scary aside from the one with the cleaver?, but whatever. But in bigger news, the zombies and the clowns swapped places, giving the zombies the prime, corner spot! This could have had to do with the fact that they’d added BrideZombie and GroomZombie, who definitely brought a black-tie finesse to their whole vibe that took things up a notch, but the ghoul kids were convinced was because the clowns being punished for doing one assholish thing too many. Now that they had so much space, however, the Man had also hung CymbalMonkey (who was, weirdly enough, a giant monkey with cymbals) above them. He didn’t seem to belong with the zombies, but he also didn’t seem to really belong anywhere else, which was maybe why he had interesting things to say (and not “interesting” like BobZombie’s “theories”). One night, after all the street people had finished their gawking and laughing and screaming, and the usual bitch session had begun, CymbalMonkey finally interrupted.
“Why are we complaining?”
“What do you mean?” chirped Fat Bloody-Headed Baby (it didn’t sound like a nice name, but he didn’t mind and there was really no other way to describe him).
“We get to sit out here on the porch for a whole month,” he said, “enjoying the beautiful scenery, people-watching, people-scaring. You’ve gotta admit, that’s just delightful.”
The zombies all grudgingly nodded and shrugged whatever limbs they could.
“Of course,” said GahZombie, who’d arrived just two years ago but had quickly become the spokesperson for the group because of his impressive, waggable tongue. “But that’s kind of just doing our job.”
“Is it really a job if you love it, or is it a lifestyle?” asked CymbalMonkey. “I look at it this way: Sure, I’d like to be able to actually bang my cymbals together and make a sound instead of just ominously moving them back and forth. And I’d like to spend all year out here doing that, and be able to know that I’ll be here for forever. But doesn’t the fact that we are only out here for one month out of 12 (the zombies gasped at this: it sounded true, but how did he know?), and that it all might end one day if there’s another hailstorm like the one that took out ScaryGoldilocks and Bear and Bear and Bear, make it that much more…special? Doesn’t it mean that we should just enjoy this time to the fullest, instead of focusing on the negative?”
The zombies and the kids and the pigs, everyone who was in earshot, were all quiet for a moment. All you could hear was the rustle of leaves (and the creepy clown laughter, but they’d all gotten so used to tuning that out that it didn’t even really register any more).
Then OohZombie asked, “What’s that word mean: ‘focus’?”
“Are you sure that’s a thing pigs do, not just a monkey thing?” said CleaverPig.
“I thought I was just supposed to play,” said Black-EyedGirl, her bottom lip trembling (although it always did that whenever she talked, because it wasn’t very well attached) and her voice rising to a shriek, “and now you’re telling me I’m supposed to be doing SOMETHING ELSE?”
“You know,” said CymbalMonkey, stretching out his cymbal arms as if to encompass the whole world, “I’m just glad to be here with y’all, for as long as that lasts.”
And the zombies kind of wished they’d listened to him, because the very next day, they were all back in the basement.
Funny in a scary sort of way, and a bit sad too.
True ❤️