Lacey

a short story about being gay during the end of the world (no, really. during a zombie apocalypse).

Lacey moved to Ohio the year before the world ended. It was the summer of 2019, unbearably hot, and I was destined to die here.

When I see her, only in my memories now, it’s glitched. Incomplete. That first glance, her standing in front of me in line at the gas station, drinking a cherry slushie, face half turned in my direction, before my brain splinters and she is being eaten, huge chunks of her ripped out and swallowed whole. But at the time, I had only thought she was beautiful, in the way that all enviable girls were beautiful; desire muddling into that confusing need to be them as much as anything else. Inseparable, really.

There was a sudden, pressing need to reach forward and peel off her skin. To crack open her ribs, step inside, and zip myself in.

“Hey,” she said, upon noticing me. “Do you live here?”

I looked around. High walls with uneven stacks of crates slumped against them, paint reapplied so often that there was a bubbly texture puncturing the top layer. Someone had opened a cooler, and the sound of it clanked around us clumsily.

“At UDF?”

“No,” she said, rolling her eyes. “In Columbus.”

When I didn’t answer, she continued. “You could be visiting, is all I mean. I am.”

This disappointed me, though I didn’t even know her. But there had been a flicker; a second where she felt familiar to me.

“Where are you visiting from?” I asked.

The line moved, prompting her forward. The cashier gestured for her to come up, which she did while reaching into her pocket for change. It was an endearing gesture, reminding me of being in high school and fumbling for whatever coins I had stuffed into random corners of my car. All of the times I had bought myself ice cream or soda or chips on luck alone.

“I’ll pay for her, too,” she said, pointing back at me.

---

We all have fates we’re trying to avoid–destinies carved out by choices. For me, it was this: never leaving. Staying as if rooted, in the same place, forever.

It had been unfathomable to me that I would continue on in this way. I had already lost these insurmountable chunks of time to the same bars, with the same crowds of people; interactions playing out on a loop, like a self-laid trap.

But all of that had changed, the universe a sock turned inside out, when I met Lacey.

For most people, the time leading into March of 2020 is marked by not knowing. Days bleeding into weeks, so many moments passing without any awareness that it was all we had left. This was true for me as well, but my life had been changed, regardless. My days were marked by time spent with her.

She had moved here to be with her boyfriend, the word bouncing around in the car with me after we had first met. Boyfriend, boyfriend, boyfriend, though that had never bothered me previously. I had held the word on my own tongue, had boyfriends myself, and yet. And yet.

We bonded immediately over the fact that neither of us was thrilled to be in Columbus, Ohio of all places, though I didn’t care to mention that I was long past being a visitor. I was a fixture in this city like everything else that meant something to me. The high school I went to, just after it was finished being built. The park with the new plastic jungle gym, after the wooden one from my childhood had been torn down for attracting wasps. The movie theater with cheap popcorn, which I took her to during the hottest days of the summer, A.C. creating condensation on our skin the second we stepped inside.

If I deluded myself into anything during that time, it was in truly believing that I could convince her to stay here with me, instead of hoping in the opposite direction. Why hadn’t I considered asking her if she wanted to leave together, instead? Some people present themselves to us as a chance, like a match striking, but we miss it. Moments like fireflies, trapped into jars only briefly before sputtering out.

Lacey, at the house party downtown, holding a red solo cup, waving at me from across the room. Lacey at the edge of the Hoover Dam bridge, standing on her toes, tipping over, hair swinging past her shoulder like a rope dropping down. Lacey at the turn of the summer, telling me that she didn’t know the leaves changed colors, asking if she could borrow my sweater, and then it smelled like her, cherries and woodsmoke. Lacey in the passenger seat of my car, rolling down the window a little bit so that she could smoke a cigarette, even though it was freezing out. January 2020, the burnt end of her cigarette a dim, blinking red, asking me, “What would you miss the most if the world ended?”

---

It took too long for me to understand what I was feeling. Bargaining and rationalizing, only to find myself, along with everyone else, left with nothing that made sense, aside from the bare bones.

I loved her. She was my best friend. And, also, people were ripping each other apart. Literally.

Our first mistake was in thinking that the pandemic would be as they presented it to us—a flu. Something to pass like indigestion. When people started dying, news of a vaccination started to trickle down, and here is where our second mistake came. People didn’t want it. Not a few people, but large swaths of them. Angry on the internet, using rhetoric which didn’t belong to them, saying things like my body, my choice. And it was in this inaction, this collective error, that the virus mutated. The selfishness of others transmitting the same way that anything else does.

We called them 19ers, after the virus which sparked everything else. Someday there might be a way to make sense of it all, but it was only the first year. Buildings still looked like buildings–a little dusty, but otherwise simply vacated. It was the absence of people, the ones who could make decisions, which added a finality to everything.

The less the world made sense, the more everything else felt stripped down. Sometimes I’d be standing outside, looking up at the sky, and I’d wonder how there was a time in which we had tried to have so many rules and structures in place. All of the hate placed on those perceived as stepping outside of it all.

Which was maybe why, even when I knew how I felt about Lacey, I had tried to deny it. What a waste. All of that time, gone forever. The opportunity to live in a world where the most important thing was to love someone.

Maybe it was still that world. Even so, I didn’t tell her. Not until the night she died.

---

We survived by staying together, long after everyone else we loved was dead, or worse. Moving from place to place, desperately hoping for a consistency which no longer existed.

Instead, it was a miracle to find something which felt ordinary. Running water, fueled by generators. Canned food. Even other people; good ones, who you could share a meal or two with and talk, like there was anything left to say. Which there was.

Favorite books, recipes, movies we had planned on going to see when they were released. Preferences and regrets. Conversations without distractions— from phones and content and endless possibilities. It was a joy, really, the last gorgeously ordinary thing; human connection.

That final night we had together, it hadn’t been an advantageous day. No food located, hair and skin and clothes dirty from lack of access to water. We had huddled together under a shared blanket and pretended we couldn’t smell one another.

“What would you miss?” she asked, and I groaned, because I was tired.

“My own room,” I answered.

“I would miss bubble baths. With candles and wine and those little wooden trays you could put your laptop on.”

Her face was lit up, hopeful, waiting for me to play along.

“I would miss…” I paused, thinking. “Fajitas.”

She laughed, covering her mouth with her hands, her whole face. “What?”

“Yeah, you know, the really noisy ones in restaurants. And then the server has to bring it out and parade it by like every table before dropping it off at yours. A whole production.”

“Okay?”

“I’m just saying, you couldn’t do that now. Too noisy. It would attract one of them.”

I watched her as she considered this. Taking it all in, as if this were life or death, which I guess it kind of was.

“I’ll allow it.”

There’s no way to know why I did it. What burst of courage pushed everything to the surface. We lay next to one another like sweaty mirrored images and I thought, why not? I kissed her, thinking she’d pull away—but she didn’t.

I kissed her and every version of the life we shared before and after the world had fallen apart passed before my eyes, a flashlight behind fingers, the shadow of her in front of me, lips pressed against mine.

Where I thought I would need words, I found that none were required. When we fell asleep, it was with my hand on her cheek, like I was just about to lean in.

---

I awoke to her screaming. Who knows how it had happened, only that it did: two undead had breached the building we were staying in. Reaching her first, they had yanked, pulling her up like a puppeteer, invisible strings snapping with that first bite.

Too late for me to do anything, including save her. The venom from their teeth, or gums, or wherever, spreading into her skin, into her blood. She knew it and yelled only one word, over and over. Run.

---

By the time it was my turn, it was a relief, really. Survival requires a pairing, and I had no interest in a new one.

That my final moments were inside a recreation center, surrounded by defunct swimming pools, struck me as the perfect irony. When Lacey and I had played What Would You Miss the Most, I had almost always mentioned swimming pools. Even after the world had, in fact, ended, it was still easier for us to pretend things could correct themselves, asking what we would miss if it was too late, instead of acknowledging that it was.

I knew, too, that it was dangerous to wax poetic about a world too far gone. What use was it to look at places and see them as they once were? And yet, as I stood staring down into the concrete pits, which at some point housed water and chemicals and bodies, I thought only of being a kid, with nothing better to do but swim. The way that the pimpled surface had pressed into my bare skin as I sat and held my legs and feet together, moving like a mermaid does through the chlorine.

Swimming pools, ordering pizza, drive-in movie theaters. I missed everything, so much more than I thought I would while I still had it. But it was important to differentiate the things which mattered most. The insurmountable losses. That was what the game had become.

If Lacey were here, she’d interrupt with the more practical stuff.

Access to dental care, she’d insist. Insulin? Why are you thinking about pizza right now?

In my defense, I’d give anything for a hot slice of pizza. Even pineapple and ham, which I had notoriously hated. Which is why, instead of responding, I knew I would have turned to her and asked, Remember drunk cigarettes?

Remember any small moment that you used to be able to steal for yourself?

Anyway, why should I deny myself the memory of pizza over someone reminding me to floss, especially when everything had been absolved in one fell swoop, a mass of cells carved out from society’s innards.

I had been using the center as a crash pad for a few weeks now, longer than any other spot I’d located previously, though I had to admit this was a pretty lucky find. The windows were too high up to smash into, with unclimbable brick walls sealing everything in. There was plenty of natural light during the day and stars flickering over me while I slept. I couldn’t figure out where I had gone wrong. Which door I had forgotten to properly barricade.

No place was truly safe though, at least not permanently. It was Lacey who taught me that. Her death, a demonstration that it was always when, not if.

The maw of the undead clicked towards me now, my impending death, and all I could think of was that I wished I could see her one last time.

The howl of the hungry, a pulse like a heartbeat. And me, gay as I’ll ever be, arms outstretched; death, the great equalizer. Our final kiss.