She walks over me.

My Dearest Readers: tonight, I shall take you back in time. Join me as I visit my old elementary school. Picture me in a most unfashionable sweatsuit (for I had a different colored sweatsuit for each day of the week then) as I take you on this tour. Behind my old elementary school there was a playground: a vast expanse of playground that stretched on and on for as far as the eye could see. Bordering the playground was a forest: a thick mass of trees, kudzu, wild honeysuckle, and poison oak and ivy so great that we called it the Great Woods. In this forest lived a woman. Her name: Bloody Mary. Now many of you may think that Bloody Mary is just an urban myth, a silly grade school legend, but I am here to tell you: Bloody Mary is real. During recess (for in those days, recesses were long and leisurely, and schoolchildren could evade the gazes of teachers quite easily), a group of us would tiptoe into the Great Woods in search of Bloody Mary, and many times, we saw the ragged hemline of her dress as she slipped behind ancient pines, and many times, we heard the snap of a branch as she, catching wind of us, headed deeper into the Great Woods, deeper than any of us had ever dared go (for, as everyone knew, Bloody Mary had no powers in the daytime).

One weekend evening, emboldened by our Great Woods Adventures, my best friend and I decided to call Bloody Mary out of the mirror in the darkest room of my best friend’s house. This room was a small guest bathroom that had no windows. Her mother and father had gone out for dinner, so we had the house to ourselves. We gathered all the candles we could find, put them in the Darkest of Dark Bathrooms, and lit them. We closed the door. We both stood in front of the sink mirror, and we both slowly turned around three times while chanting, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.” We looked deep into the mirror, and I swear we saw her face.

I did not look into mirrors or walk past mirrors for months after that.

And now, just for the fun of it, I shall present you with my favorite scene from Night of the Living Dead. They’re coming to get you, Barbara.

Oh yeah! The poem! So the zombie above was a quasi-transition, I suppose. The title of the poem was inspired by Suzanne Wise’s poem “50 Years in the Career of an Aspiring Thug” (click title to see poem) because Suzanne Wise is, well, The Most Awesome, and she deserves a Diamond Heart Necklace.

15 Years in the Career of an Aspiring Undead

Etched name in dirty oven’s ash.

[and rest-of-poem is now on a mission to find a better title for itself kbai!]