Zombie-cide

A response to Deb Markanton's "Saturday Spiller" in Flashy Fiction.

Tallulah stood beside the bed looking down at her sleeping body. She'd been trying for the last ten minutes to wake her sorry self up. Finally. Vacant green eyes appeared and her lips curled in a lazy smile that morphed into rictus.

"I wouldn't be too pleased about the new day just yet," Tallulah said. "Look at what you've done."

Her body looked down at her wrists and the bloody gashes that stood out against her pale flesh like exclamation points. The blood had run out and soaked the bed and even splashed upon the weathered hardwood floor leaving maroon drops that were drying brown. She couldn't even commit a suicide cleanly. She urged her body -- she couldn't keep thinking of that as her body -- to stand and it lurched upright and the blood, half coagulated, fell away from her body like blood red Nickelodeon slime.

Tallulah coaxed the body into her bathroom. It stumbled against her desk chair and fumbled to the floor, but the bloodless legs didn't show any bruises.

"Tallulah, what are you doing up there. I don't want you missing the bus again," yelled her mother from downstairs. Wasn't death supposed to have released her from mother's constant carping.

Tallulah bit her lip as she stood behind her body -- no, the body -- and helped it to dab itself clean with a wet cloth. She then directed it to pull out white medical gauze and wrap it around the wounds on the body's wrists. The body's dexterity was shot to hell and the bandages weren't tight, but that didn't matter. No one at school should notice, they never did pay any attention to her. She urged the body down the stairs to breakfast and wondered how she was going to get herself out of this mess.