A Grey Matter (memoir of an undead)

It came as a bit of a shock the day I found out I was dead.  I mean, how would you feel if you had been lied to all your life?  If you discovered your brain had deceived you with seventeen years of perception, taste, and touch.  If your pulse had continued the lie approximately 72 times a minute, echoing the soft lub-dub of a treacherous heart.  If all the sinews and veins hissed in soothing deceit, “you are alive” to the hearing ears of a rotting corps.

That was me.  And on that day I realized just how dead I was.  True, I was walking, moving like the others through the busy street, but I was no more living than a flesh-craving cadaver, shuffled right out of Dawn of the Dead and roaming the world of living.  Looking around, I began to wonder if they could tell – the living I mean.  I looked at my reflection in the darkened shop windows and gagged at the image.  I was decaying, decomposing, putrefying slowly away into ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust.  The intense precision of the eye liner pen and Vogue coppied lips now turned the reflected visage yet more horrific as I saw the bulging, blood-shot, lidless eyes beneath and the toothless, black-green gums contorted in a gruesome mockery of a smile.  My skin peeled and tore away and all around the exposed flesh of my heart, maggots wriggled in the nauseating foulness that was their host.  Of course they could tell.  I was completely dead. 

Yet they took no notice.  Not of the stench of moldering bodies.  Not of the revolting creature pondering its condition.  Not even of the blood staining the lips and chin around an insatiable mouth. 

Then I was stuck by a yet more shocking realization.

They were dead too.  Every last one of them.

Dead as I and staggering around on broken legs and moaning like starving creatures for blood.

“as for you, you were dead…gratifying the cravings of [your] flesh and following its desires and thoughts.”

All dead and groaning, this graveyard population reached and ripped with bare-bone fingers.  Eternally starving.  Eternally thirsting.  Eternally unsatisfied.  Eternally craving.   I must have it.  I want it.  I’ll take it.  I’ll kill for it.  I’ll shred you apart to get—

…something…

I need…something…

Something…what is it?

Oh God, what do I need?

All they need – all I needed, for I was just as undead – was a taste of the living.

So I took one bite.

And found it consumed me instead.

 “But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions.”