Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The remaining members of the Zombie House of Preservatives have voted to impeach Zombie President Brayne for a second time. Accusing Brayne of “formenting a buffet” by urging his zombie supporters to eat members of the Zombie Congress, the measure passed 50.5-49, which was enough to carry the House after 338 members were devoured by rabid Brayne supporters last Wednesday. It was technically a bipartisan measure, as the upper half of Mortician Party Representative Pons joined with the 50 surviving Necrotic Party members in passing the articles of impeachment. The remaining 49 members of the Mortician party, which includes the torsos of 6 members and the lower halves of a further 4, opposed the measure.

Mortician Party representatives gave a wide variety of excuses for voting to support Brayne. “We, really, deserved to be eaten,” said one party member. “It’s our own fault.” Another Mortician Party representative claimed that the pro-Brayne horde had been a “false flag attack” of living humans disguised as Brayne supporters. The most common response to questions about the vote from Mortician Party members, however, was “shut up.”

The impeachment now moved to the Zombie Senotaph, where a 2/3 vote among the remaining Senotaphers is required to remove Brayne and bar him from running for reelection in 4 years. Given that same body’s acquittal of Brayne one year ago, after he was captured on tape eating a world leader, a conviction seems unlikely. Despite the attack, Brayne’s opponent, “Dully” Oblongata, proclaimed that he still intended to take power even if he was exercising it from “within the stomach of the opposition.” At press time, Brayne had not formally responded due to the confiscation of his tongue by the Zombie Security Advisor, but had made a number of what anonymous sources call “angry noises.”

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“The name’s José Donzerly, and I’m a national hero,” he said, thrusting his chest out.

“Oh?” said the Prylzakian border guard, looking bored. “You don’t say.”

“I’m mentioned in the American national anthem, even.”

The Prylzakian looked up. “You’re joking.”

“José can you see, by the Donzerly light?”

A pause. “Welcome to the Republic of Prylzakia, Mr. Donzerly.”

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Uri Savashadam, the top Israeli assassin, stared across the table as the joke hung in the air.

“Did…did you just make a joke about how drinking only almond milk would be just nuts?” the client said.

“Yeah,” Savashadam said, downing a tall glass of the stuff. “Is that a problem?”

“Well, I’m just not used to it.”

“You’re used to assassins with sticks up their ass, eh?” Savashadam laughed. “Well, I like to make jokes, so deal with it. Murder can be fun, so why not enjoy life while making a killing, eh?”

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Chris ran a hand over the book, feeling the raised print under finger and palm. It was glossy, like a well-loved leather binding, even as it looked utterly new and unread, its leaves parchment-brown and ragged as if they had just been cut. On the title, embossed into the center of a sunburst, was Chris’s name.

“What is it?”

The oracle regarded Chris through the featureless expanse of its mask. “It is your book,” it said. “Your tome. Every story in your life, that has happened or will happen. Written at the time of your creation by the same hand.”

“What if I change something in it?” Chris said.

“Many have,” replied the oracle, evenly. “People have traveled here through fire and death, through their own private purgatories and worse, to set hands upon their tome. You may tear leaves out, alter them, or add new ones.” The oracle gestured to an inkstone and calligraphy pen at its side with a robed limb.

Chris opened the book to the section indicated by a fine ribbon bookmark. Glancing at the page, it seemed to be about the encounter with and questions asked of the oracle.

“The bookmark represents where you are,” said the oracle. “Changing the leaves that have gone before will alter memory. Changing the ones yet to come will alter reality.”

“Why would someone want to tear out their memory?”

“It is by far the most common action among the lucky few that have made it here,” the oracle said. “But the choice is yours. Alter memory, alter reality, or leave the book as it lies and return to your waking life.”

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Digging Bird
(Pipilo erythrophthalmus, eastern towhee)

We hear you calling your name from the verge, proclaimed boldly by a shy speaker. When you venture out, kicking with both legs for buried and chitinous treasures, your red flanks shine above white, with midnight black or chocolate brown above. But there are no songs about you, no poems, no postcards. Your brilliance is every bit the equal of bluebird, redbird. But without their brashness, their showmanship, you remain a well-kept secret, scratching your work onto paper of unyielding clay. Perhaps that’s how you prefer things.

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Laser Bird
(Colaptes auratus, northern flicker)

Echoing there, on the verge of the woods, a sound straight out of science fiction. A lonely Endor laser blast, cutting through the gloom of the real 21st century, the real and depressing future. Perhaps he knows he is declining, as the second-growth pines of the south are plowed under for ever more condos. Perhaps he knows that his kind may never see a future like the one hinted at in their calls. Or perhaps he knows it is easier to fade away like a strange sound echoing in the woods. When we see him, rarely, he is on the ground. Silent. A ersatz pigeon, with nothing to link him to the fading call we hear every so often on the wind from the woods.

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Laughing Bird
(Sitta canadensis, red-breasted nuthatch)

We hear him up there in the pines, cackling at a secret joke with a pal or two. What is so funny, that this tiny tree-hyena is in stitches? Perhaps he knows that there are birders nearby, birders with decent cameras who would love to catch even a fleeting snapshot of him. But Laughing Bird is small and fast, a blue-orange blur, and he knows that anyone with a camera capable of capturing him is camped out by the lake looking for migrating shorebirds. His is the laugh of the carefree, the jester, who has let you in on a private joke even though no one will ever find it as funny as he does.

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“Did you hear about Saint-Marc?” Jean said. He was reading from a stack of letters that had been brought in with the latest supplies, his cuirass and spurs still attached from the day’s fighting in the hostile Spanish countryside.

“Handsome Marc?” said his compatriot, Louis-Luc. “What happened to him?”

“In Austria, he lost his cheek.”

“What?” Louis-Luc said, rocking back in a liberated Spanish chair, his boots pulled clean off a liberated Spanish desk stuffed with plunder and booty destined for the Emperor.

“He was shot, in the cheek,” Jean said. “It was torn away. He’ll live, but…Handsome Marc no more, eh?”

“I initially interpreted ‘lost his cheek’ to mean “became less cheeky,” Louis-Luc said.

“As if that could ever happen, with Marc.”

“Then the mind went straight to butts,” continued Louis-Luc. “I shan’t lie.”

“You went from his personality to his ass in the space of one misunderstood sentence,” Jean said. “That’s quite fast. Even for you.”

“What can I say? It was a roundabout journey with all the twists and turns and cracks of an adventure novel. Only without leaving my chair.”

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After urging his followers to break into the Senotaph chambers and devour all the Senators there preparing to certify his opponent Medulla “Dully” Oblongata’s victory, Zombie President Brayne walked back his remarks in an early evening speech.

“I love the way you, my fellow zombies, are breaking into the Senotaph and devouring my opponents, tearing them limb from limb,” Brayne said. “But if you could do it quietly, peacefully, respectfully, that would be nice.”

Despite the fact that they were literally being attacked and in many cases devoured by Brayne’s rabid followers, 3/5 of the Mortician Party’s members in the Senotaph objected to Zombie Vice President Mortis’s certification of the results. This was not enough to overturn the results of the election, however, as the Senotaph and Mortis voted to uphold the results before they were torn to shreds.

In response, the surviving members of the Mortician Party admitted that Brayne “could have handled the situation better” but dismissed any talk of removing, impeaching, censuring, or talking to the Zombie President in any way would be “premature” and “an overreaction.” In contrast, the Necrotic Party, which is set to take over both the Senotaph and the Blight House in a few days, confirmed to news outlets that it had composed a “polite but firm letter” that it was passing to Brayne’s underlings, with the hope that they would “give him the jist of it.”

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“That’s Vigorish Sleesh,” said TCG-80. “Some folks know him as the new Andromeda Fats, but not me.”

“Tiny” Bucca frowned. “He just looks like a slug in a fancy suit to me. Andromeda Fats was more than just a tub of lard, he was the best Tarazed Hold-Em player in the Fifty Systems.”

“Ah, but Mr. Sleesh has a secret weapon,” TCG-80 replied. “He has a tumor in his probability gland, you see. Quite inoperable, but also rather benign.”

“Aldebaran bareaks have probability glands?” Bucca said.

“So do you, yours is just so small that it hardly makes a difference. But Sleesh? He will always have the least statistically likely set of cards in any given game. Most of the time that’s a winning hand, but not always. He loses just enough bad beats to keep him coming back.”

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