The Spark - Excerpt from a novel I stopped working on.

The Spark slouched on a bus stop bench under a burning sun. She half-slept under a black umbrella with electric pink and green polka dots. The Spark was black, clad in dark clothing, with a half-sleepy look on her face. She didn’t move. She hadn’t moved, in fact, for several hours. She might have been dead during that time. It would be hard to prove either way, unless you took her pulse, and there was no one around who could be bothered. Even if there was, they would be less inclined to touch her than they might be to touch anyone else, given that she might be presumed dead and thus susceptible to zombism. Even before the zombies’ recent overthrow of the Rules of Life, starting with the rule outlawing cannibalism, she would be a person most human beings would hesitate to touch. They might have to tangle with her somehow. And she was a big woman. Two-fifty if she was an ounce. Furthermore, she was sort of mean-looking, in that way that a sleepy-eyed lioness looks mean; that is, uninterested in you unless you are prey. And she was old. Or young. Depending on how you looked at her. Her skin wasn’t creased so much, although it was healthily pitted; no wrinkles, it just looked worn, like a church-house bible, smoothed but almost calloused by careful use. She sometimes looked as if she had been around since the dawn of time, but at the same time couldn’t possibly be a day over thirty-five.

The Spark sat under the umbrella under the bus shelter and smiled. She had been smiling for days, weeks, perhaps, white teeth glinting out from under the shadows and curves of her lips. It is possible that the zombies had simply considered her dead already, ruled out as fodder. It was more likely that the zombies did less considering than all that, and simply ate anything that looked like a meal and happened to be moving. The Spark may have looked like a meal, but wasn’t moving.

In happier times she had been of the Afrikaa Bambaataa Zulu Nation, a wayward youth drawn in by the electric hum of Something Different, punk rock fed through a synthesizer, disco programmed by sandpaper itself, overseen by space aliens of boogie, a tremulous droning sneer that you could dance to. There was always a message to electro, always a meaning, even if it was just Dance Today, Be Free Today. Usually it was more complex, the inter-marriage of Black Pride and Social Conscience, the will to civil rights and social justice. Usually it was about Unity and Identity somehow at the same time. Usually there was no cause for a fight, because we can use all the help we can get. Usually it was unusual. The Spark loved the Unusual. She might have been called the Unusual if she had not been called Spark.

“Would you believe I once had bright red hair, like an orange flame?”

“I guess so.”

“I did, honey.”

The Spark had been the name she wrote on trains, the name she would have tattooed into her shoulder if she had ever wanted a tattoo, the name by which she would be known when her given name was of no use to anyone. Now, for instance, a couple of zombies, swaggering and staggering with tongues lolling out of their useless heads, dead tongues like fish, jerked and revolted down the street past a barber shop. The price was ten dollars for a buzz cut and several more for a style. The front window was shattered and the chairs inside were slightly spattered with blood and that blue solution combs are kept in. Apparently someone had, just prior to having a very close, zombie-tooth-administered haircut, thrown a jar of combs at the offending monster. A trail of combs and blue drips led to the rear of the store and undoubtedly into the alley out back.

The Spark was hallucinating, she was sure. She had begun hallucinating days ago. Someone had told her once in an AA meeting the court sent her to that the day would come when she’d just start to see things that weren’t there. This was the day she had better quit drinking, because those hallucinations were DTs and DTs could lead to death. The Spark had asked what she should do, was there any way to fix it? There was not, they said, don’t move around too much, and don’t lay on your back. Yeah, said another guy, you don’t want to choke on your own vomit. This started a conversation about Jimi Hendrix and some other rock stars that had unintentionally done that very thing, but the Spark was busy then, thinking about how she was going to get out of that room with all those fucking crazy people. Nobody drinks that much, not nobody I know, she had thought to herself.

The Spark was hallucinating badly now, because there were all sorts of evil things treading around and causing a scene. She wondered if maybe it was riots like she’d seen before, and the DTs were just making it look like a horror movie. This was the worst withdrawal she had ever experienced. She was so sick and weak she didn’t want to move, so that part was easy, but sometimes she felt so full of fear that she thought she would just burst open. And there was that little part of her that told her that this was all real, that everything she was seeing was non-fiction, that this would go from 398 in the Dewey Decimal System (Folklore) to 909 (World History). She told that part to shut up from time to time, to go run and hide from this evil. She watched the zombies drag their cluttered forms past the barber shop and the car wash and keep heading down the street toward greener pastures.

The Spark simply sat, stock-still, waiting for the hour when the fever would break, when she would sleep and wake up in a cold sweat, feeling like she’d pissed herself and smelling like she had sweated out evil incarnate. The Spark sat, and she smiled, and thought about a Leonard Cohen song. “I smile when I’m angry.” The sun beat down on the world, merciless and crude, but a bus shelter and a parasol shielded the Spark.