Zombie Versus Fairy Featuring Albinos Read Online Free Page A

Is she doing this intentionally? To hurt me? To rub what she has—life, warmth, ease, and flexibility—in my face? Or is she just so completely unaware of what it means to me?
    Whether she knows it or not, there’s a stark element of viciousness to this: her beauty and how liberal she is with it. On the other hand, if she were conservative and shy, she’d probably just inflame, frustrate, and maybe even infuriate me. There’s no winning with her. And me. I’ve never spent much time thinking about how beautiful supernatural creatures should act. It must be impossible. If you come right out and say, “Look I just want to be your friend,” you seem egotistical and presumptuous but if you don’t lay out the ground-rules, you might wind up leading someone on. Maybe beautiful supernatural creatures don’t have it as easy as I assumed.
    I don’t turn on any music. I just fall onto her sofa and wait for her. The sofa is dark brown wood that flows out from the walls so fluidly it seems more like a thing of water. Its cushions are thick. They’re the same spongy green moss that covers the floor. The light is bright. It pours in through an apartment-wide, floor-to-ceiling window. The whole apartment is cut off on one side. It’s not a cross-sectional cut. It’s right at the edge. The wall that looks like it should be there isn’t but the apartment is so comfortable it doesn’t feel like anything is missing. The apartment just ends and the sky begins. The sunlight flooding into the side of the tree, into the side of me, into the room where I am, sitting on soft moss that smells of freshness and life, everything I’m not, while waiting for a fairy to shower, is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It’s not the perfection of its brightness: it’s neither glaring nor dim. It’s not the perfection of its temperature: it’s neither too warm nor too cool. It’s the perfection of it. It’s impossible. Yet I see it and feel it and know it can’t be but I don’t care. Can light be happy? I think this light is happy. It’s not burning unimaginably in the cold dark of space and sometimes reaching out, with a flare, for something it can never touch.
    I feel worse than I did before. Even though I want to be here and, if the word makes any sense coming from me, I think I’m “glad” to be here, because someone who’s so everything-I-want-to-be has seen me and reacted with something other than unmistakable visceral revulsion . . . but how can a starving man, left alone with a feast, not want a bite?
    I can hear the water running in the shower. She’s singing a song I don’t know. I’m trying to not to think of her warm smooth body moving under a spray of clear-but-strangely-white water. I’m trying not to think of her doing what I tried to do yesterday when I took a shower: getting clean. I’m trying not to imagine this:
    I get up. I stagger, slowly, toward the bathroom door. With my deformed-by-death hand, I try the smooth wooden doorknob. I do it as quietly as I can. It’s unlocked. I open the door. Steam enshrouds me, ghosting out into the cool behind me. I see her through the shower curtain of hanging and dripping weeping willow branches but she doesn’t see me. She’s lit by the bright sky pouring through the skylight. I look at her slender naked body. If I had a normal heart, it’d beat faster, harder. If I had regular blood, it’d course. It’d surge. If I could breathe like a human being, I couldn’t breathe. I stumble toward the dangling willow branches. I yank them to the side. She screams. What good does screaming do? She slips, falls, gets up, backs up, away from me, slapping at my arms, which are always reaching out and which now reach out for her. The water hits me but I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything but my cold hunger-lust. She’s shaking her head from side to side crazily, screaming and screaming. I grab her and yank her close to me. With my mouth wide-open and my jagged broken