Awakening

You knew this day was coming. You woke up and touched yourself. You did not know if it was your hand that was cold or the back of your neck. As you grasped the hollow metal of the tap you realised that it did not burn with freshness. Your children rushed in and grabbed at your questing fingers and found them slimy and sad. Holding them close, their salt tears barely registered on your tongue.

They are far removed from you now, waving with the sun behind them and dawn swallowing them up.

You knew this day was coming but you still got into your car and made the commute to work. No breakfast, no coffee, no need to see the headlines. It is all uncuriously disaffecting now.
There is a low groan in your cubicle all day. It is the same low groan as ever, but this time it is you.
When you come back home your partner accosts you. They bring the truth on a platter of silence. You shamble past, bed-wise and hungry for sleep.

You knew that one day you would wake up dead, but you didn't realise how little would change.

Author's Note

The final processes of gestation were prompted by Harley with her poem The Dead Have Come. I am very happy to have come across her work for this and other reasons.

Reviews

[Harley]

Let me start by gushing excitedly: I LOVE this piece. I feel I could see straight through the man's (Is it correct to address him as a man when he is really a zombie? Hmm...) eyes and I adore that in an author. I feel how little he cares, how little he even notices. I feel how mundane and routine-like his life is, day in and day out, how it all means so close to nothing, and how close to regret he almost comes before I imagine that he just nods off. This is an excellent piece and I very much appreciate the second-person point of view, it is very well fitting. Applause, friend, you've done an excellent job while retaining economy of words.

[TLK]

I like my economy of words so much that sometimes I wonder if I buy the organic kind... that would explain my rationing of them!

You've really hit on the purpose of the piece here. Do zombies care? I'm a Psychology teacher, and I regularly mention an example of brain damage affecting personality -- a TV interview with a man who received a small head injury in a car crash. He was only unconscious for a minute, and woke up before the ambulance got to him. But he damaged something in his frontal lobes (? I think ?) and no longer felt social emotions such as love and loyalty as important. Logically he knew that he 'loved' his family, but in terms of his actual response he said that he could happily leave them and never come back.

I wish I could find that on youtube, it was chilling.

[Harley]

That is quite chilling! If you ever find it, do send it to me.

[Justin Xavier Smith]

I love the ending to this piece, and I think the buildup works pretty well. It definitely evokes and emotion and a feeling, if the writing feels a bit distant or disconnected. That does aid the theme of the story, about the death of life or at least of "living," although some of what's happening doesn't work for me. Describing tears as "salt tears" feels redundant. The lack of characterization for the remainder of the family feels deliberate if in affecting. And yes, the character is as unaffected by his family as we are, but it might be more meaningful if they are still attempting to live and we actually care about that.

[Bewitched]

yo nailed it, completely, you took the subject and painted it beautifully. well done, loved reading it, it held me to the end.

[Bjarte Knutson]

Most have said what I might have so I will remark on the more fundamental level: You play with the words well. It is not all dead leaves and rain bein symbols of tears. You create. You paint the story, the feelins, but not directly maken sadness. This does not make me sad of life, or for the writer, but rather as lesson of life.

[Emily B]

i would listen to ed, he's seen such things and knows a good deal

[TLK]

He is the person who I listen to the most attentively.

[Emily B]

me, too

[Ed Hart]

at this point (which is not rare) a person can come back into life by giving themselves a good wake up call, which begins by casting their bread upon the water...