Day 6 - Night

Slowly, I am finding myself able to break from routine.
Up until now, a familiar set of
movements, locations, and habits
have let me establish something of constancy

in a world where nothing is comforting
and the unusual threatens with unseen teeth.
Just one week ago, these patterns
would be labeled as OCD by anyone.

But no one is around now
and I have to call it that myself,

though I have redefined the letters
so that now I suffer from
Obligatory Consciousness Diversion
which is only a problem
if I don't pay attention, in which case
I'm apt to lose that consciousness permanently.
Which almost happened last night.

I was checking the fluid in my lighter for the third time
when I caught a scent so foul
it could only mean there was a putrid heap of rotting flesh
mere feet from me. I looked up,
and there it was, damn close.
It's not true what they say,
that your whole life flashes before your eyes. Unless my life
was this stumbling, half-dismantled corpse, I saw nothing.
I took a breath
that I assumed would be my last, and held it.
And held it.
And held it, until I learned something:

zombies can't see for shit in the dark.

Which is why I'm choosing the night to travel
for now. In the day my movements are too easy to spot.
This is the sole basis for my reasoning
that it might be safer to move after dusk, and doing so
should circumvent any encounters.

My first steps, the moon watches me
with a reserved expression.
So far, so good.

I hope to hell that guy wasn't blind to begin with.

Safer, I think. I'm invisible.
Safer. Sure.
But a whole world scarier, too.
How many of them
can the swollen night hold in her belly?

There was never any monsters in the closet growing up.
Flip on the light, nothing. Clothes.
"That's the same way it looks in the dark."

Still, to remind me I'm not
one of them, fear prickles beneath my skin
and shakes its way
outward,

I can feel time slough down my frame
as the years crawl off me, gently.

I am a child again.
I'm out at night with my friends,
staring at the abandoned house and
daring each other to step inside.