The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Of course it had to happen! What did you think: the South End would be immune? The South End is quarantined from the cultural diseases of the Outside World?? That the contamination couldn’t spread down to here??? Get a grip! Look around. The world has grown real small since you last took off your Google Glass, man. Or since you put em on….

The Zombies are here. That’s right, here on the South End. They’re everywhere else, right? They’ve long overstayed even a teenager’s infatuation and now they’re in the same category as skateboarding or Dungeons and Dragons, passing fads that never pass, they just lobotomize the immature brains of their adolescent hosts, then stick around into what we euphemistically call adulthood. Science can’t explain it. Science doesn’t even try. The Johnson boys have been slinking around the Diner’s nicely sloped blacktop parking lot since about 1995. Big Larry put a stop to their truck surfing where they’d grab a tailgate, crouch down behind the bed out of sight, then ‘surf’ their way onto the highway. He assured them he’d drag their crazy asses clear to Stanwoodopolis if he caught them at it one more time. Nobody doubts Big Larry’s follow-through on threats.

Except the zombies. They came in one Friday night, all goobered up in whiteface make-up and blackened eyes, smeared Hunts ketchup all over their mouths and giggled over their French fries at the customers’ reactions, mostly boredom, but a little bothered the teens couldn’t take their antics into town ‘where they belonged’. “Wuz up?!” Big Larry asked when he stepped out from back behind the grill, looming over the table of kids like Godzilla over Tokyo. All he got back was snorts and chortles from the guys, averted black sunken eyes from their dates. “Halloween early this summer?” he tried again.

Zombies, as every yahoo in America knows after years of movies and books and cable programming, don’t communicate verbally much. They make guttural sounds, they smack their lips on the bloody meat of their victims, they just don’t remember English. Larry said menacingly, “You ghouls better clean that ketchup slop up before you go, otherwise I’ll be cleaning YOU up, comprende?” The zombies suppressed their laughter, the zombies left a mess the way zombies always do. So yeah, the zombies are among us, even down here. When they learn to skateboard, we’re all in serious trouble. Even Big Larry.

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