My friend "M" says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can't smile, because your lips have rotted off.

Peel off these dusty wool blankets of apathy and antipathy and cynical desiccation. I want life in all its stupid sticky rawness.

I wince at her use of the word "human." I've never liked that differentiation. She is living and I'm dead, but we're both human. Call me an idealist.

The shadows of the room pool in the lines of our faces, draining our eyes of hue. "There's nothing left worth saying.

Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below.

I wish people were willing to dig a little deeper than the surface elements of a premise before tossing one story in with another.

And yet ... But what if ... I want to do something impossible. Something astounding and unheard of. I want to scrub the moss off the Space Shuttle and fly Julie to the moon and colonise it, or float a capsized cruise ship to some distant island where no one will protest us, or just harness the magic that brings me into the brains of the Living and use it to bring Julie into mine, because it's warm in here, it's quiet and lovely, and in here we aren't an absurd juxtaposition, we are perfect.