She sat silently in the corner of the ice-cream shop, eating her treat under the somber watch of the stone Virgin and the saints across the street. She turned to look at the face across the table from her; a face so familiar yet so distorted- the monstrous ghost of the man she once loved.
He had not said a word since she ran to the store after receiving his jumbled message.
“This isn’t going to work, is it?” she whispered, barely holding back tears. “You aren’t going to get better, are you?”
His bloodshot eye looked sadly into hers; This had been his last hope, his last desperate attempt to cling to a trace of his vanishing humanity. His face contorted grotesquely as he tried unsuccessfully to speak; after a lengthy and agonizing internal struggle, a single, unintended phrase slipped out:
“Must. Eat. Brains.”
(Author’s note: The first sentence was written after a visit to an ice-cream shop across the street from the above pictured cathedral in Cartago, Costa Rica on a rainy, gloomy afternoon. I was hanging out with friends, however, and did not actually break up with any zombies that day…that part was just written.)
