The Voodoo Zombies

Hot air hung heavy in the furnace of the bayou

as the traveler wandered, feet sloshing in mud,

his mind focusing through the thick darkness

like a train headlight cutting through a tunnel.

The traveler wore a curse over his heart,

a broken black cross of ash,

that had been there since his life’s love

had been wafted away from her sickbed.

To calm the empty storm

that filled his life in place of purpose,

he wandered the bayou in a cocoon of numbness

in search of a voodoo cure.

The traveler found a wooden shack

in the sweat of the deep green bayou.

The wooden walls held a soft yellow glow

like a lecher embracing a New Orleans prostitute.

He entered the creaky shack with thin ice feet

and found Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen,

with her dolls, skulls, and alligator skins.

She smiled like a snake through the fragrant smoke.

She was a Creole woman with light tan skin,

her head wrapped in coils of yellow cloth,

her body draped in a light flowered dress,

and her neck hung with voodoo charms and lockets.

She already knew his past, present, and future,

and warned him of the dangers of waking the dead.

She tried to give him a crucifix for protection,

but the traveler cringed with black widow fear.

Queen Laveau gave him a bag of grey dust

to sprinkle on the tomb of his lost love

whose memory was dissipating from his mind

like mist evaporating into the tarry bayou air.

The traveler left the shack’s eerie comfort

and sauntered out into the sinking bayou night,

as alligators watched hungrily from the heavy shadows

and bullfrogs grumped their low songs into the darkness.

He made his way to an elevated graveyard,

beyond a high levee lined with lazy weeping willows,

where his wife was buried in a small stone tomb,

a dark grey structure dripping with warm, damp death.

The graveyard was a city of the dead

with ornate tombs lining narrow walkways

like eternal homes lining city streets,

patrolled by swarms of hungry mosquitoes.

He trudged to his wife’s stark tomb

and sprinkled the dust over it in a hopeful dream.

A breeze brushed by and blew the dust haphazardly

across the city-like expanse of the graveyard.

The heavy stone slab creaked open.

His wife stared blankly, her white dress hanging in tatters,

her pale skin blotched with blue decay,

but he looked past her ghastliness and held her in his arms.

The other tombs stirred with phantom movement

and their slabs moved aside quietly

as scores of zombies emerged from the darkness

and filled the cobblestone walkways.

The traveler kissed his wife

one last cold kiss, trying to dream himself into the past,

as the zombies closed in with outstretched hands,

moaning with years of simmering boredom.

They pummeled the traveler with bony fists,

hard with the chill of necrotic jealousy.

The zombies clamped him down to the damp ground,

and he gasped for breath beneath the frigid bodies.

His wife carried his battered body into her tomb

to lay beside her to await eternity.

The slab slid shut bringing a tactile darkness

as the zombies returned to their tombs like a receding tide.