Fiction: No Zombie

By Maximiliano Guzmán

He grabbed me from behind, gave me no time to react.
We were alone in the house. My father and I.
He pulled down my skirt and panties.
It was an instant of horror that stretched and still stretches to this day.
With his right hand he covered my mouth, choking my scream.
It was violent.
And it lasted so little for such a deep and eternal pain.
When he finished unloading his sexual fury against me, he simply looked at me as if I were an insect and slowly walked away with his pants down to sit on the couch. Like that, with his member already limp. He lit a cigarette, grabbed the remote control and turned on the television. Soccer, news, 80s movies, zapping—ultimately, he zapped while I, exhausted and torn apart, cried in the living room.
What would Mom say about this?
But there was no Mom in the house we shared, just the two of us.
That was the beginning of the explosions.
Everything thundered inside me before sleep, I waited crouched with the intention of stabbing him with a kitchen knife, but it was useless, he always came when I was half-asleep and couldn’t push him off. A strong man. A strong man without a soul. Inhuman, savage, voracious, brutal.
…And in the morning he was a ray of sunshine with breakfast on the table, with his pathetic smile and the reading of New York Times.
“Hello, daughter…” he greeted me so formally, so benevolently.
I could barely look at him, but he forced me to by slapping me, demanding I sit at the table before school.
I quickly understood why my mother fled without saying goodbye.
My father, my private hell. That’s how I could begin a letter to Mom.

My Father, My Private Hell:
I write you this letter, Mom, without knowing where to send it, without knowing if you’ll ever read it, maybe never. I write to announce what you already knew would happen.
Yes, it’s Dad.
It’s Dad…

What a waste of thought, what a waste of pain and grief.
Evil is not cured with more evil, and my father will never be cured of his perversity. Not even dead will I be able to kill him from my life and erase his memory.
And we are together at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner. Together, and he insists we be closer than ever, insists we escape to the Sierras Chicas, escape together from the police, the judges, the neighbors. He says our love is so great—and always puffs out his chest—that his heart can barely stay inside his body. He says he loves me while saying he hates me for not loving him the way he loves me. But I am his offspring, his princess in a toxic fairy tale.
“I love you too…” I answer, head down, every time he asks with contained rage if I love him more than my own life.
My father carries the weight of his conscience with total lightness. He has friends and talks to them about me.
I don’t care what he tells them. He already lied that I was adopted, that there were no blood ties, that the photos of Mom pregnant were staged theater, that those photos and pantomimes were rules to marry and get the house from my grandfather. That my mother left because she was a miserable woman without a country.
He talks about me to his friends and I know only a few of them know what really happens in the house. And they know, and with the cruelty of someone who knows an erotic secret, they just pat him on the back without telling him to stop or let me go.
So many times I wanted to escape… but escape alone, without him.
Now he has bought a new television to watch soccer matches in better resolution. And also to watch pornography with the volume as high as the new speakers he bought to attach to the TV.
But my father is not alone in this. It’s everyone, out there. Everyone…

When I walk the streets I am the only human, the only living woman in the city.
Because they are all dead!
They are insanely dead with their truncated, banal stories, confessing to the sky that God does not exist.
Because they are all dead!
And my father and his friends too.
They drool, walk slowly and hunched, crawl from work to home to fuck their damned wives and partners, but they too crawl, desolate and cold, justifying every pleasure and every hatred with the same desire with which shopping malls keep opening their doors for these dark, rotten dead who walk without breathing. Who walk making fatal any destiny, any future.
Because they are truly dead!
Because I have survived the explosions of war.
But everyone sickened at the same time, everyone lost their minds at the same time, rotting, coughing black blood, paling without dying completely in what can be called the Living Dead, Zombies, or any synonym vaguely describing the symptoms with which the people of the city and the world coexist every day since the blasts that turned society upside down.
They are all dead, and as dead they are capricious, jealous, violent, resentful. Women no longer throw themselves for love, children hate toys, men are vile animals seeking in cannibalism and sex the redemption of life they lost when the gases entered the houses, when bodies were stained and there was no cure. And I, more than the only survivor of a holocaust that at first seemed like the best Hollywood movie and ended in childish decadence, an invisible, silent, imperfect, unfinished, incomplete, forgettable holocaust, except for me.
I would like to understand why.
Why am I alive among the dead?
What is the final destiny?
And sometimes, it’s funny, I know. Sometimes I put on dirty clothes stained with earth and feces and blood and go crawling around like the others. That pleases my father, and many times for doing that he limits himself not to touch me, simply thinks with his tiny, soaked brain that I am also one of them. And he thanks me by leaving me in peace, though I cannot escape his torture and torment. Beyond, there are also monsters, also zombies willing to go insane with practicality and kidnap me in their unheard-of barbarity to satisfy the life they want to recover, a life that slipped away too soon with the unpleasant and imperturbable mask of happiness haunting them like a daytime nightmare.
I walk through a city seized, bombed, annihilated, rebuilt in chaos, tension, and the extreme fragility of bodies betraying their coldness and decay, waiting for death to be total and disintegrate them on the sidewalks.
I am the only spectator, the only one who has triumphed in this global defeat, where everything has turned to mud and terror reigns alone, always present to trick me and show me that in the infected bars they already play songs for my death.
I am the next.
And I wait for it pretending it won’t happen.

 

 

 

 

 

Maximiliano Guzmán (b. 1991, Recreo, Catamarca, Argentina) is the author of the novella Hamacas (Zona Borde Editorial). He serves as an editor for the digital magazine La Tuerca Andante (Argentina) and has published short fiction across magazines in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Cuba, and the United States.