January 8 2010

Zombie Apocalypse

I’m a zombie fan. Movies, books, Jill’s fairy tales… Put a zombie in it, and I’ll automatically take interest. I’ve totally got my zombie survival plan ready (my husband will perish, I think, because he hasn’t watched as many zombie movies as I have, poor guy) but the truth is…

I’m probably dead, too. Here’s the problem:

meljean's embarrassing picture Once upon a time, I was a kid. I might have looked like the kid to the right, even. Like many kids, I had both sisters and Barbies. And like many kids with sisters and Barbies, when we were mad at a certain sister we’d cut her Barbie’s head off.

Many, many heads rolled in the Brook household. But the worst didn’t happen to a Barbie … it happened to Ken.

For a long time, we didn’t have a Ken — our Barbies made out with each other and with Star Wars and He-Man guys, instead. But finally, one day, I got one (and the seeds of my hot romance-writing heart were born.) But then, one day while we were playing with Ken, he fell into something disgusting.

Now, I’m not a squeamish person, so the stuff itself wasn’t the issue. But there was another force at work, and that was: I wanted to make my sister pick Ken up out of the disgusting stuff. She refused. She wanted me to do it. I refused. And since there is no kind of stalemate like a sisterly stalemate, Ken remained in that stuff for weeks. When the stalemate broke, we declared him dead, took him out to the shed and buried him.

A few days later we went out to dig him up… and he wasn’t there.

And that moment probably explains why my mind is so effed up today, folks. I might be the only person living who has actually sat through all of the movie Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye, where the little doll-like troll tries to suck the life out of a sleeping Drew Barrymore, but that’s exactly what I thought Ken was going to do: come back while I was sleeping and suck the life out of me.

oh noes gif But now I know how it’s really going to happen. When the zombie apocalypse happens, and people are running around screaming and shouting ONOZ and OMG, I’ll be safe and secure in my little attic hideaway, my store of food big enough to last until the zombies run out of brains and starve to death, and with all of the entries blocked.

Can any place be truly secure against a back-from-the-grave Ken doll, though? That’s 12 inches of brain-eating terror, my friends. He can crawl through ventilation shafts, wriggle through tiny spaces in the walls — and he’ll bring all of his headless Barbie-honeys along with him.