It's true... you can look in your daughter's eyes
any time, and see the little girl she used to be.
If you don't have kids you don't know. You can't
imagine what those heart-strings can sing like.
You can't hear the echoes of every moment
that lead to this. How there's been so much loss
that you want to hold onto something, hold her
the way you used to, before everything got crazy.
For my family, like anyone in my neighborhood,
the crisis didn't start all at once. We heard news
stories and didn't believe them. We told jokes
like "This zombie walks into a bar... bartender sez,
"We don't serve your kind. So the zombie eats
his brain!" "You should've had the zombie say,
"Is this bar tender?" And we'd laugh, drink beer
and "stand watch." Things like this don't happen
to people like us." We really used to believed that.
One day my daughter comes crying to me, says
she was "playing in the woods and found a baby,
but it was a mean baby, and it bit her, and now
I have an 'owie' on my arm..." I was so... calm,
I cleaned her wound. I used witch-hazel, alcohol.
She cried, but I told her it would help her feel
better. She said "I don't feel so good." "Daddy,
I feel sick..." "Daddy... I feel cold... Daddy...help me,
I'm hungry..." To this day, I've only seen one zombie
at a distance. I wanted to keep shooting it, even after
it fell. I wanted to blow its head to wet chunk pieces
and then keep shooting every little bit of madness
back into the grave. I don't have near enough bullets
for that. See, people who don't have kids don't know
just how precious those last two bullets can be...
No comments:
Post a Comment