SmokeLong Quarterly

On the third night of looting after the election, I’m holed up with Grandma Beryl in assisted living because emergency services are at max capacity. I need to make sure she doesn’t take a tumble, choke on a biscuit, dislocate another limb—die. Nowhere in the post-stroke guidance does it say anything about not watching horror films. Especially one where, in the opening scene, a zombie child gorges on the brains of a mallard duck.

“This ok?” I ask her.

But, as with every question I’ve asked tonight, Grandma barely grunts. So I take it as a yes. Yes, I can crack open her fancy box of chocolates. Yes, she’d love a vodka spritzer with a wedge of lime. Yes to frozen pizza and the latest zombie flick on pay-per-view.

I lock Grandma’s wheelchair into place next to me and hold the drink’s straw to her mouth. She may be a million years old, but the vodka still goes down fast.

“Pizza?” I say, pressing a slice to her face so she can bite. It takes her longer than it should to scissor off a piece, tomato paste ringing her lips and her left cheek. I wipe her with a napkin and, in the reflection of her rheumy eyes, see the dead duck reanimate on screen. It joins the growing throng of brain eaters: the child, his babysitter and her boyfriend, who, even before the child turned him, was the hungry type.

The look on Grandma’s face conveys everything, reminding me she knew a guy like that once. All hands and mouth, thick as a brick. And though it repulsed her at the time, these days she’d be willing to overlook a lot for a little bit of action.

I feign shock at her silent thoughts and she produces a breathy laugh, bathing me in a periodontal fog of pizza and rot.

Grandma Beryl was beautiful once.

She often told me before the stroke took her speech, that, like most women, she didn’t realize how gorgeous, how worthy she was until it was all behind her.

Normally, she’d follow this sentiment with a pointed look, and she’d move to brush a lock of hair behind my ear and her hand would shake or her wrist would click. And I’d say, ‘Are you ok?’ And she’d say, ‘Never mind, it’s nothing.’ Then she’d ask when I’m planning to settle down, have kids, give her something to actually live for. And I’d look at my watch and make a smart-ass statement like, ‘How about in five minutes, does that work for you?’ or single out one of her elderly neighbors, usually old Mr. Peters, and ask about his virility, joke about the size of his cock, until we’d both cackle and go back to whatever we were doing.

But now, post-stroke? Now we stare silently at the TV and watch the duck munching on a prostitute.

“More brains,” the duck says in a squeaky alto, as if eating brains did more than dull the pain of death, as if it could impart some sort of human sensibilities.

I suddenly resent this zombie duck now that it has more speech capability, more agency than Grandma does. Does she resent it too? If so, she doesn’t let on. She scissor-bites another chunk of pizza while the duck rampages his way through the entire red-light district, feasting. I swear he has a hard-on.

Grandma’s attention darts between me and the TV, and she struggles to produce a mouthful of aphasic sound, a formless soup of garbled vowels and soft consonants.

I try to piece the sounds together. Ask her to try again. Beg my brain to do better, try harder, but I don’t know what she’s saying.

Duck peckers are corkscrews? Fuck that asshole duck? or, I love you, I love you, I love you?

I wrinkle my forehead and the ice behind her eyes reveals everything. She knows I can’t understand. That, try as I might, I’m powerless. Helpless to help her. Desperate to do something, to fix her, save her. Pissed off that her brain’s been looted from within, and who knows when the next mutiny is coming.

And what then?

I reach for her fancy chocolate box, tear off the plastic, and pop one into her mouth. Grandma chews slowly, carefully. One chocolate to my four. Five. Six. I suck on a creamy center, and she shoots me a look that says, what else is eating you?

If she could still talk, she’d call me a cliché of a sad girl, hiding from my feelings behind an armor of fat, afraid to face the future or the truth.

“Uh-uh. Nope. Not gonna talk about it,” I say, and luckily, I don’t have to because the duck, now sated on prostitutes’ brains, has swollen to the size of a cow. It waddles down Wall Street in broad daylight, consuming consuming consuming, until Grandma Beryl, high on vodka and sugar, nods off beside me—head tipped at an awkward angle, softly snore-breathing.

Somewhere in the distance, the faint sound of sirens. Gunshots.

I punch up the volume on the remote.

On-screen, everyone is on the march together—a mutant zombie army of hollowed-out prostitutes and stockbrokers, postal and factory workers, goth teenagers, doe-eyed children, parents and diaper-dragging toddlers. Out front leading them all? The fucking giant zombie duck with his wild eyes and blood-spattered feathers and bottomless hunger.

They march on shopping malls and swimming pools, airports and old folks’ homes. It’s audacious, a national emergency, a red phone event. The cardboard-faced president escapes on his out-sized plane and orders, “Nuke ‘em. Nuke ‘em all.”

Just before the missile lands, I switch off the TV. I don’t have to see the end to imagine what’s coming. Instead, I take Grandma’s sleeping hand in mine and suck down the remainder of her vodka spritzer, chew at the bitter rind.