Read A Questionable Shape for Free Online Page B

mid-morning, and for the most part, through many of the blocks that I passed, things were as Rachel said. While there were no police ‘assiduously’ patrolling our neighborhood, there were no roving infected either. Only wide streets empty with midnight and orange with the brume of the streetlamps. I kept to the sidewalk, alongside wide-lawned townhouses that seemed—except for their boarded windows—perfectly peaceful. Live oaks lined each street, holding out their heavy branches like armfuls of scooped leaves, and they cast erratic shadows through the foggy light. When overhead a warm wind blew, swaying the trees’ branches, the branch shadows would sway too, sweeping darkly over the sidewalk concrete and over my feet. The shadows swept back and forth, like a massive phantasmal broom. In the humid air all around me, the streetlamps’ orange brume; and on the ground just beneath me, the oak trees’ black broom. What a nice and tranquil evening! Was Rachel right? Were flashmobs of undead an anomaly? Was it actually possible to walk alone unmolested, as if the epidemic—the riots, the fires, the cannibal feeding frenzies—were just a nightmare the nightly news was having? Was it really over, as easily staunched as any other modern outbreak: no more apocalyptic, in the end, than AIDS, the West Nile virus, or bird flu?
    She was right. Undeath felt as far from our beautiful neighborhood, from this warm morning, as those bombs in Tel Aviv. Soon I even felt safe, at ease, and after a while I was able to put thoughts of the undead out of my mind entirely. The sky was unusually clear and bright, and all I had on my mind was the full moon. On a nighttime walk before the epidemic, under a similarly clear sky, Rachel had once marveled to me over how many poems had been written about the moon, how many metaphors
and similes people had devised, in the history of figurative speech, to describe it. What if the moon was encrusted over with these metaphors, Rachel asked? What if it had built up these centuries of metaphors around itself, like a mollusk secreting its shell? And when everyone dies, she went on, when the human race blinks out and all of its poems are forgotten, what will the moon then look like, having crawled out of that shell?
    A day before my three-a.m. stroll, even an hour before it, I would have answered her that we would find out soon enough: that the human race was finally perishing, being extinguished by this plague of undeath, and that as soon as every person (including us) had been infected, she and I could turn our cloudy, white eyes to the night sky and see, uncomprehending, what shape a naked moon took. But while actually on my stroll, walking through those peaceful streets, where I could see by the light of that moon that there were no infected, I answered her (i.e., mentally) who knows! It might be millennia yet before we humans die off, and there are still so many more metaphors with which to calcify the moon.
    That was when I saw the infected, the first I’d ever seen. He was a middle-aged man in running clothes, standing in the road a couple of blocks away, and even if there hadn’t been a bloodstain soaked through his T-shirt (the stain looked more like a great black bib, at that distance, than anything else), I would have been able to tell by his stillness, utter and inhuman, as well as by the posture of his forward slouch, that he was undead, that that white marmoreal figure in the road was not to be called out to. When I spotted him I froze, just (as Rachel had said!) as if I’d seen a black bear. Something wild, dangerous, my own death. He was facing in my direction, his body angled toward me as if he were looking directly at me. But did he notice me? Should I back away slowly? If he did notice me, would he moan and alert others, or would he follow me silently back to the apartment, dogging me like Nemesis? And what was he doing anyway? He
only stood there, as