Congratulations Brad Pitt!

Today, through a combination of magic and science, you’re going to be hurled bodily back through time and space into the body of one William Bradley Pitt.  This will be occurring at the moment he’s deciding whether or not he wants to take on producing Max Brooks seminal found-novel, World War Z.  You’ll be fully aware of everything Brad Pitt is thinking and feeling, but you won’t be able to control any of his actions – you’ll simply be party to what will, in that instant, be your actions.

You’ll sit, after finishing the book, and think to yourself, Well that was unfilmable.

Then you’ll throw your pen in the air and think, God, but money is nice.

A tiny voice will cry: Do you still need money that badly?

A chorus will boom in response: YES!

You’ll shrug and send an email to your agent:

I think I’d like to make a really shitty zombie movie based on this book.  Well, not based on it, really.  Using its title.  I can be a hero dad who is really strong and smart and saves his family while they’re getting ready to go on vacation and zombies attack or something.  It’ll be all like “Ahhhh!” and I’ll be all like “Pow Pow Pow!”  And then they’ll be all like “Oh noooooo!”  And I’ll be all “I’ve got a cure for stuff!”  But it’ll be like, a cure that lets me kill people.  And maybe involves a sacrifice.  But like, not a real one.  Make the wife a redhead – redheads are pretty.

Your agent, in the future, present past, will receive the email, sigh, and get on the phone with a studio head, who will promptly greenlight the project.  You, in the present-present, will awake, techno-wizard hanging over you staring you in the face, foul breath fogging your glasses.

“How did it happen?” he’ll ask.

You’ll rub your head, tears welling in your eyes, and murmur: “I think maybe Brad Pitt isn’t as smart as people think he is.”

The techno-wizard will be unsurprised.

Congratulations Brad Pitt!

Congratulations on Burying Her Deep Enough This Time!

The blood on the shovel will stain the dirt with each strike.  Deep red, almost black, it will flare on the earth for a half second with each strike before fresh earth, newly disturbed, obscures the color of her blood completely.

It won’t have been your fault.  Your choices were limited.  When your zombified wife rises from the grave, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.  In this case, what you had to do involved beating her with a shovel until her skull looked like a ruined melon and then putting her back in the ground.

You thought you were done with this a week ago, after she turned following a particularly wild night out with some of her ladies.  But no, you were wrong.  Whether it was the voodoo priest she snubbed at the bar or the meteor that she posted a picture of herself pissing on on Instagram, your wife rose from the dead a second time and shambled out of the shallow grave you put her in, clad only in the rags of the clothing that she wore on the day you buried her.

So you took your shovel and knocked her down, slamming it on her face again and again and again.  You wanted to be certain that your wife was dead this time.  If mystical energies are going to pull her back together then fine, whatever.  But you’re going to do your best to make sure it’s harder for her to come back.  The first order of business, which you’re seeing to now, is burying her at least eight feet underground.  You’ll be doing it alone, as is custom for American yard burials, so it’s going to take you most of the rest of the day, but your wife won’t stir during the process, so don’t worry about that.  When you finish you’ll line your yard in bells so that she won’t be able to sneak up on you again.  You’ll also start locking your house in general, a wise idea, given how many zombies are in your neighborhood nowadays.

Congratulations on Burying Her Deep Enough This Time!

Congratulations on Murdering Your Ex With a Hammer!

Bruises on thighs turned to bruises on lips and eyes and then it had to end. Four years ago, three if we use dates as a means of tracing time back to the time before calendars became unfortunate inconveniences. It was a bad breakup, a bad end to a bad time that made you do bad things.

It would be easy to say that you hated him before, that you hated him when you swung at his skull, but you didn’t really. You knew the face, not the eyes but the shape, the hairline, the half-beard, the scar. You let the hammer carry through, obliterate the skin and bone and muscles underneath and didn’t concern yourself with cleanup.

It was the way of things – you and your friends needed food. He was already dead. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t blink, just limped and lurched towards you stiffly. When he fell you imagined a sigh of relief, though it was probably just gas escaping. It will be a heartbeat where you’ll feel selfless, like you’ve done something good for someone for a change. That isn’t a feeling you get to have that much anyone, so that’ll mean a lot.

Once the dust has settled you won’t remember where his body falls. You won’t try to find him or say any sort of last rite above him to sanctify what has transpired. You’ll grab all the oatmeal you can, stuff it into a duffel bag along with readymade soups, boullion and anything that was still sealed inside of a plastic bag. You won’t even look down as you walk out, but that night you’ll dream of him, what he looked like long before.

You’ll think about the time you had with him, the moments you felt happy, the end, the devastation and the movement beyond what he said: that he couldn’t deal with being someone who’d been raped, that the burden was too great for him. You’ll recall the weeks before the ending, the weeks that stretched into months, the self-destruction that came back, that almost didn’t leave.

When you wake up the next day in your sleeping bag, ass to ass with the man you’ve been fucking whenever you can find a safe moment of privacy, you’ll have a big grin on your face. You won’t be able to describe way, even to yourself.

Congratulations on Murdering Your Ex With a Hammer!

Congratulations Zombie Carwash Owner!

Some people are amazing business people. They just come up with ideas that no one knew they wanted and make them into businesses.

You are not one of these people.

Today, in an attempt to make lemonade out of the lemons that are the zombie outbreak that took the world by storm you’re going to start the world’s first zombie car wash.

It’ll be a disaster, since mostly zombies will just vomit blood on windshields instead of cleaning cars. You’ll get a handful of customers, but they’ll mostly just show up to kill your workers, since zombies won’t have any kind of protected status under law. They won’t even be considered legitimate property. The only reason you won’t be arrested on the spot for owning zombies is because if they arrested everyone who owned a zombie, they’d be arresting half the population.

But no one will shed a tear when you finally close your business’ doors in a month’s time. It was pretty poor taste to enslave other people’s loved ones to try and make them wash cars for you while they were trapped in undeath. And it was a shittier idea to do it in the ruins of Boston, where people were assholes to start with.

And we’d like to tell you your next business will do better. But really, no one is going to want to buy a shotgun with a pitchfork attached to it from the guy who used to run the zombie car wash. The zombie outbreak is over, and that business idea would’ve been perfect during the outbreak, but now it just makes you look like you can’t get over the outbreak that took your wife and family from you.

Nut up, junior. Lots of people had hard times during the outbreak, and you don’t see them whining about it. At least, not quite as loudly or publicly as you seem to be doing.

Congratulations Zombie Carwash Owner!

Congratulations Zombie!

You and your friend Sam will be at the Lyn-Lake Rainbow Foods at three in the morning. You often find yourselves there, stoned off your asses and buying Ben and Jerry’s so you can eat it while you watch Jay and Silent Bob and giggle to one another about how much cooler people who smoke pot too often are than everyone else.

You’ll be shuffling down the isles, considering some Shark Bites fruit snacks to go with those Cooler Ranch Doritos you’ve selected when you’ll notice a young man running through the store.

It will be Reggie, the manager, who normally just looks at you like you’re human waste. But tonight his eyes will be wide with panic as he races past, gasping. He’ll be muttering “What the fuck” over and over to himself. You’re really high, so you’ll giggle at first thinking that Reggie is totally wigging out.

But after a few moments standing there, thinking about your snack food choices it’ll dawn on you. Reggie couldn’t have been wigging out. He’s a square, doesn’t smoke pot, and therefore simply could not wig.

You’ll explain this to Sam in a series of monosyllabic grunts that the two of you have fine tuned into some retarded working system of communication and he’ll nod in response and suggest that the two of you investigate the cause of his distress.

When you come to the front of the store you’ll see that it has been overrun by shambling corpses in various states of decay. “Bro,” you’ll say to Sam, indicating that this is an unthinkable scenario, one which rattles your perception of reality to its core.

Sam will nod, indicating that he is also shaken, but remains comforted by your friendship and the support you offer. The two of you will hold hands for a moment and squeeze, briefly becoming lost in each others eyes.

Unfortunately this momentary distraction, lasting around two minutes in length, will be long enough for those zombies to get their teeth and claws into Sam, drawing him into their mass and devouring him as he screams horribly. You’ll try to pull him out, but all that you’ll get for your trouble is a nasty bite on the arm.

You’ll shout his name, then flee down the isles to the back of the store, where you take shelter within the walk-in freezer. Your entire body will be numb in there before long, with the exception of your arm.

The bite there will be throbbing and giving off the most intense heat you’ve ever experienced. It won’t hurt, per sec, but it’ll feel as if your life is leaking out through the wound. It will also have a strange warming effect on you.

Fearful that you will have become infected you’ll engage in your standard emergency medical procedure, smoking the last of your stash. Good and proper stoned, you’ll reflect on Sam and how good a friend he was, the way he always giggled absently when you spoke, the way he appreciated all the same movies you did and junk.

It is with these thoughts that sleep will finally find you, dragging you into a deep, comfortable slumber.

You will awaken, a mindless undead creature, in a few hours, immobilized by the combination of the THC and the cold. Your pathetic brain will be wracked by confusion and frustration, and all you’ll be able to think of now is your hunger, insatiable and unquantifiable, consuming all you’ve ever known.

It’ll be like the worst munchies you’ve ever had. Just hold out, though. In a few hours an Army zombie-eradication squad will find you and destroy your tortured shell with a flamethrower, although they will notget a sweet high from the smoke and ash as you had always hoped.

Congratulations Zombie!