MicroHorror

Shelby Day had long legs like bones in skinny black jeans, built like a boy in green combat boots. All limbs and inelegance, the geometry of her body cut in a narrow waist, small breasts and no ass to speak of. Because of this the boys in Parker County looked through Shelby rather than at her. Small town boys liked blond hair and cheap beer and breasts spilling out from tight shirts. Shelby couldn’t compete with that.

She stopped trying in high school, when puberty passed over her with an anticlimactic sigh. She had only watched from the sidelines, while every other girl in town started filling out bikinis and halter tops over the summer of Shelby’s quiet dissatisfaction. Somewhere down the line, Shelby figured out that teenage boys were stupid, and Parker County boys were even dumber. They just talked about football and beer and big tits, anyway. She didn’t need that.

The nice thing about the end of the world was that there was no one left to look at her breasts. Except for Spike and Bill and Jo, but they didn’t really count. Shelby wasn’t concerned with their opinions on her breasts in any event.

“You know it makes me nervous when you do that,” Bill said from the lawn chair on the other side of the rooftop of his uncle’s repair shop, sitting by the portable CD player running Dolly Parton on loop.

Jo was downstairs behind the barred and boarded windows, cooking lunch from canned beans, eggs and cured ham. Spike sat nearby, chained to the railroad spike Bill had driven into the asphalt, as he occupied himself watching the crows fly overhead. Bill was cleaning the heavy Colt .32 he appropriated from Howards Guns and Ammo down the street, his dirty blond hair smoothed back from his face with a handful of water. Squinting in the afternoon sun, he scratched at a stripe of grease on a stubbled cheek, licked the dust from his bottom lip, and let out a sigh.

“Do what?” From the ledge of the roof Shelby swung the purple hula hoop around her skinny hips. She watched the hordes of zombies from behind her father’s aviator sunglasses, the ones she’d found on the dashboard of his truck the last time she saw him. They all stumbled around aimlessly down Main Street below, a moving mass of decaying flesh, moaning and burping from bloodied jaws.

“Tempt the zombies like that,” Bill answered patiently, watching Shelby in distraction as he began to piece the disassembled gun back together again. He made it sound like Shelby was the dog that peed on the rug, after repeatedly having her nose rubbed in it. “It’s just weird. And I think it’s gonna give Spike the wrong idea.”

Sitting on his ass four feet away from Shelby, Spike rattled at his leash in what could pass as irritation. Bill looked at the zombie and rolled his eyes. Shelby let the hula hoop drop, catching it with a turn of her wrist and stepped back from the ledge.

“Oh, Spike’s fine,” she brushed Bill off, planting a hand on her hip with an affectionate glance in the zombie’s direction. “You know he’d never hurt anybody. He’s like a big Labrador puppy.”

Spike made motion to clap his hands, missed, and instead burped appreciatively. Bill shook his head with a sigh.

“A dead Labrador puppy,” he insisted, popping the clip into his newly cleaned and assembled gun. “With a wooden plank nailed to his head.”

Shelby made a face, sliding the sunglasses to the top of her head. “Nobody’s perfect.” Tossing her hula hoop in Bill’s direction, she sat down on the ledge and peered over it. A zombie with a missing arm belched, while another in a patterned yellow sundress chewed lazily on the missing limb. It looked like her third grade teacher, Mrs. Thompson. Shelby sighed.

“Besides, that’s the one benefit of having a flat chest: even the zombies don’t want you.”