Escape Velocity
This is a day she hasn’t known to expect, when her husband will die. When she died, her husband brought her back; but when he dies, choking on a forkful of steak, she cannot do anything but watch. She cannot even open her mouth to tell him she’s sorry, she loves him, she’ll miss him, if these things are true. These are only the rules someone else has made for her: how men can bring the women they love back from death, how women can only watch the ones they’ve loved made continually more distant. She is the first woman, of all the women, to be made alone in this way. She is the first woman, of all the women, to reveal that there may be a bigger problem the world has failed to foresee—that a woman made undead will remain undead, even when there is no longer a man to care for her.
His family does not want her at the funeral. His son—her son—drives her to the Greyhound station and hands her a bus ticket. He does not help her board, and so it takes her several hours and attempts to be allowed on one of the buses, holding the hollow of her empty purse to her chest. She sits in the back, alone, next to the clogging aroma of the toilet. They drive all night, pausing one time at a rest stop, and she is not sure where she is going, and she remembers and then forgets her husband’s funeral, the fact that her own son does not want her there. She is watching the stilled landscape of childish pine trees when the driver shouts for her to get off, final stop, can you hear or are you deaf as well as dead? She has so many things she would like to say to this driver, but she takes her bag and stumbles from the bus, blinking, into the raw heat of the parking lot.
* * *
What to do, with the zombies who are still living not-living after their makers and caretakers have gone? Put them together, people decide, see what happens. A pop-up exhibit at Epcot, two dozen women wearing generationally-specific clothing, their hair in rollers or ironed straight or curled around the stink of rotting eggs. What do the women think? What do they feel? Not much, from what tourists can tell with their noses pressed to the plexiglass wall. The women walk in circles, stand before the stove, lean close to the television, dab fingers of salt to their tongues, sometimes look out through that wall. At times the women open their mouths to one another as if mouthing forgotten phrases. One woman, a pink foam curler knotted in her hair, stands with her nose to the glass, fingers pressed to her throat, as if she can see them all just on the other side. They can’t see us, the tourists assure one another, because they think it’s a mirror. One woman unbuttons her shirt just enough to reveal the DNR tattoo between the white lace cups of her bra: Do Not Return, Do Not Return. She stands with her head cocked to one side, watching them watch her, until a handler enters the scene. He turns her from the crowd, buttons and safety pins her shirt. How many of the tourists have their own tattoos on chests, arms, necks, detailing instructions for their afterlife? The zombies weren’t clear enough, these tourist women tell themselves as they drive home with their husbands and children. They didn’t make their wishes well-known, they could have been louder, they could have been more explicit. The only women who are remade as zombies are the ones who want it, somehow. These are the things every woman knows even as she imagines herself with hands pressed to that plexiglass screen.
* * *
Next to the bus station is a diner where she carries a cup of lukewarm coffee to her mouth again and again. There are some habits she has retained from life: this, a fondness for Rocky Road ice cream, always washing her hands before a meal in a restaurant. Things that no longer hold any pleasure or meaning. A man spins on one of the treacherous, wobbling stools, and tells her a story about his morning at work. And then you wouldn’t believe—, turning her face so she can watch him imitate his manager. It’s so rare, he tells her, to find a woman these days who will just sit and listen. She stares at the waitress, who is inspecting a key lime pie on its stand and refusing to look her way. When she finally leaves, not having paid, the man follows her through the parking lot and onto the road, he grabs at her arm, he reminds her that she has nothing to lose, she’s already dead, she’s already dead. What difference would it make, to spend a little time with him.
* * *
One night they break out of Epcot and find their way to Orlando, stumbling down the shoulders of highways beneath billboards bearing their own faces. They stand unsmiling at bars, tilting glasses of wine to their cracked lips. Just another curiosity, nothing to see here. Enough wine and their brains fog in a way that feels pleasant and natural. This is a way they used to feel, they think as they let the alcohol swim across the shallowed surface of their minds. Locating memories so vague they might be imagined: of happy hours and wine-fueled dinners and sticky-floored college parties, all these nights they never knew they would long for. For the surety of their own lives pulsing beneath their fingertips, the warmth of their own exhalations. When the bars close they roam the streets, stumble apart from one another and take themselves in smaller groups to Disney World or Universal Studios or the Kennedy Space Center. They stand with hands pressed to the railing, gazing up at a suspended rocket, looking like they are caught in a dream, if they can still dream.
* * *
He drives her farther and farther from the rest stop, he won’t stop talking, he is a man who likes the sound of his own voice. He hates her, she knows. What she is. There is something in the turn of his lip, the way his eyes flick to her continuously, that reminds her of the husband whose image she has been unable to locate since his death. Nights spent in pretended rest at his side, his snores studding the walls, dreading the moment when he will wake and look at her and turn away. As if it is her fault she has been made this way, as if this was a life she wanted. Day after day doing the cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, never sleeping, like she has not noticed all the ways she’s been unmade. I made a mistake—she remembers him saying this once, like it was an apology. When the man is checking the traffic at a stop sign she opens the door and falls from the truck. This is another thing that could be a mistake. The man yelling, a car honking, but she is walking away. She has already forgotten him.
* * *
Saskatchewan, that is a place to send the undead women without men: a place where no one will have to see them and be reminded of the world they helped to build. The Arctic. The Sahara. Cruise ships float aimlessly and endlessly through the Atlantic, undead women bumbling against each other on deck. Laying face-down on vinyl-banded pool chairs, desiccated breasts hidden beneath loose, untied bikini tops. Mouthing songs in the karaoke lounge, splashing wine and vodka sodas on one another whenever the ship yaws. Fighting for the bottom bunks in their crowded cabins, because none of them have the coordination to reach the top. For a season they’re served by college students gathering material for their law school applications, but then they’re left to their own devices: holding Morton’s canisters over their mouths, licking the edges of margarita glasses, gazing longingly at the sea. Salt, salt, salt. One mouthful of salt, and they will be their old selves. That is the story, but of course some stories are only stories, and even the true ones are incomplete.
* * *
There is a town, a house, a blue porch, it all feels familiar. Blue railings, blue door, blue shutters. No one answers her knock, so she keeps knocking; and then finally a boy is there, her boy. Older, his hair cut short to hide its balding. She steps forward when he tries to shut the door, welcomes herself in. It’s okay, she would tell him if she still had a voice. My boy, my boy, my boy. How many children does she have? A son, a daughter? She cannot remember. But love is not a forgettable thing, and she pulls him close. There is so much feeling in her two arms that she does not know where to put it. He did not mean to send her away, she thinks, he did not. She holds him against her chest until he forgets to struggle, holds him until he is quiet, lets him shift to the floor. Then she is not sure it is her son after all, and her whole body is a hurt. She touches him, leans close to smell his pale damp skin, closes her eyes and finds a black space where her memories belong. As if someone has carved a part of her away, without having thought first to ask permission.
* * *
Who ever dreamed the earth would be overrun by undead women? They’re colonizers, one man editorializes. They only want to drive us out. Let them colonize someplace else, another man writes. We have the technology, writes a third. Don’t send them to the Moon, aim high, send them to Mars. Someplace where they’ll do good. Yes, agree the living women with their tattoos and their advance directives, yes, it’s time we get these women out of our sight. A movie star volunteers his first wife to rocket into a world she might populate anew; then a politician his daughter; then the CEO of a major online retailer his fiancée, who is not dead yet but headed that way. NASA and RSA size the women for suits and settle them in rooms modeled after spaceships, but otherwise offer no training. Doctors prompt fertilized embryos into the women’s flesh, no harm if they don’t take but if they do—a new planet to populate. It will be a year before the first women reach their destination, but what is time for an undead woman, nothing. Its passage is only painful for the people who have stayed behind, who look up to the sky and wonder which flash of light might be their wife’s ship, if she is happy, if she has arrived.
* * *
She walks. She walks until her feet have rubbed raw at the heels of her sneakers, until the sun has oozed its shadow across her skin. The last time she traveled, she thinks, she was alive. She would have been a young woman with a map folded incorrectly and bulging in her pocket, a dog-eared guidebook in her purse. Her husband would have held her hand and encouraged her to use sunscreen. Perhaps these things are true. She walks through one town and into the next, she pauses before another house that feels familiar until, suddenly, it does not. Again and again this happens. A pebble slingshots against her shoulder, then a rock against her back. When she turns, there is a mass of people clotted behind her, urging her on. Not in our town! one man shouts, the woman at his side wearing the glossy, inconstant eyes our woman recognizes as kin. What can she do but move and continue moving, until her flesh looks ready to shuck itself free of her bloodless foot.
* * *
One unharnesses herself during countdown and is pinned, through liftoff, to the wrong end of the spaceship. One cannot find how to unclasp herself and for weeks strains against her seat. One eats their entire unnecessary supply of astronaut ice cream, strawberry flavor, in a single hour. They press their faces to the window, watching the earth opening out beneath them, the moon here gone here again, then all of it blinking away. They press their fingers to the stars passing just outside. They clamber free of their stiff suits and float, bumping, into one another. They eat packets of seeds they are meant to plant and hold their hands wonderingly over the expanding stomach of a young woman sleeved in tattoos proclaiming her intentions for life. Two weeks before landing, a baby emerges with its mouth stretched wide and face red but making no sound. Alive, dead, undead, human, zombie? They float the baby from hand to hand and ignore the exclamations from mission control, the air around them somehow dead but smelling full of life.
* * *
She walks a looping decline onto a highway, she walks with her left foot on the rumble strip, she walks while cars bleat past. She walks, she walks. She is silent and focused. At some point she exits the highway to a town that is a single street of blinkered shops, plastic bags tangled in tree roots. A bus stop is home to a bench missing its front slat and she settles here, removing her feet from their shoes and spreading her toes. A pickup truck drives past, and she stiffens as it returns a few minutes later. It briefly blinds her with its lights before pulling to the side of the road and loosing a man who walks to her side. Come on, he says, let’s get you out of here. She recognizes something, the way he looks at her, and she wrenches her arm free to walk again—down this street, and this one. She cannot remember so many things: her name, her husband’s name, how she died, what she did for work, the smell of her son, how she felt on her wedding day, how she died, her first day as an undead woman, the rush of saliva when salt hits her tongue, how to shape her mouth around a word, how she died, how to make herself known. But she can walk and she does. The pavement is warm beneath her feet and the night is cool. No truck is idling behind her when she turns. There is an ease in the ground beneath her feet and the comfort of knowing there is always another step before her, that in the morning the sun will reveal the earth bowling open on every side in a burst of colors meant for no one but her.
* * *
What is it like, for the first women? Fumbling clasps and air-tight locks on suits, patting one another on the back as they step to fine red soil, holding the unsuited baby to their chests. One small step for man, maybe they will think this—maybe not. Will they follow their directions, erect the greenhouses, plant the remaining seeds? Will they remove their suits, walk naked through the endless landscape? Undead women on an undead planet. Maybe they will turn in the direction they imagine home to be, maybe they will turn off their one-way communications with mission control, maybe they will decide not to wait for living people to come after them. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe they will find the rules broken for them on a new planet. They will make their own rules in a place that has known no one but them. Teach these rules to their baby, their firstborn citizen of a new world. They will open their mouths and for the first time in centuries they will find words, clumsy and grating, spilling from their mouths. I am here! they will shout. My name is! We are! I am! I am!
Ellen Rhudy (@EllenRhudy) lives in Philadelphia, where she works as an instructional designer. Her fiction has recently appeared in journals including Joyland, The Adroit Journal, Cream City Review, Nimrod, and Monkeybicycle. You can find more of her work at ellenrhudy.com.