Love in the Time of Zombies by Lynn Messina Page B

gone. His chair is on its side and his napkin is in the middle of the floor. I follow the trail of arm ash to the kitchen to find my zombie date trying to open the microwave door, where a second serving of the cervelle is cooling. Twinkle Toes is on his left shoulder, trying to help.
    The relief I feel is so intense, it’s immediately supplanted with an equally strong sense of embarrassment and shame. I can’t believe I actually brought a zombie to my house for dinner. I cooked for a rotting, smelly, decaying clump of flesh. No, not just cooked—slaved over the stove for this less-than-human being. Then I spent the rest of the evening worrying that he ate my cat.
    Other people might be up for this but not me. Hattie Cross is too good to date an animated dead thing, even if it does mean achieving a long-held life goal of publishing a piece in Whirligig, the fun, irreverent, internationally famous section of The Xombie Review.
    Hmmm.
    Well, when you break it down like that—Whirligig, published, life goal—it doesn’t seem like an entirely dismal proposition. Twinkle Toes is fine, so no harm done there, and I’ve learned vital information about myself: namely, that I will never date a zombie.
    Calmer, I grab my phone and take a few selfies with Kaa and my cat. Then I shoot two dozen pics of the carnage wrought by following Katya Yusenoff’s useless advice. I get a particularly good shot of Twinkle Toes licking the ash off Kaa’s arm. The image roils my stomach, but I know good photojournalism when it makes me gag.
    I open the microwave door and take out the cervelle, which is now soggy and starting to separate. Luckily, Kaa is no discerning gourmand and he eagerly, if lumberingly, follows me to the apartment door, down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. I place the dish on the garbage can near the corner and walk away without a backward glance.
    As far as exit strategies go, it’s pure improvisation, which I’m forced to do because Katya doesn’t provide tips on how to end your zombie date gracefully. In her perfect little zombified world, your new rottie stays forever. You + Zombie + Dinner = Mated for Life.
    I can’t think of anything worse.

    The Xombie Review is the high-minded magazine you wish you had time to read. It arrives in your mailbox every Monday and sits on your dining room table or kitchen counter staring up at you, its colorful cartoon cover a rebuke to your inability to properly manage your time. Honestly, all you need is another 153 minutes a week and you’d be set.
    You do, however, have the 20 minutes required to whip through Whirligig, with its arch tales of New York City life—and so do half a million other women. For this reason, getting an item in Whirligig is a hugely massive deal. It won’t earn you gobs of money (or even any money, if you’re an intern like me), but it will score you bragging rights and the attention of every editor and agent in town.
    If you want to be a respected journalist, there’s no better place to start.
    Because I aspire to nothing more than respected journalist, I stop at Claudette’s on the way into the office to pick up a dozen haute-cuisine doughnuts for Mehta Goldberg, senior editor and Whirligig gatekeeper.
    In the month I’ve been interning at The Xombie Review, I’ve gotten almost two dozen doughnuts for Mehta. Every morning around 11 a.m., the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner craves a round of fried chocolate dough. It happens every day like clockwork, but Mehta doesn’t recognize the pattern. Each time the yen overtakes her, it’s as if it’s the very first time it’s ever happened. She’ll buzz me on the intercom and say, “You know what I could really go for, Ms. Cross? A doughnut. Can you possibly scare one up?”
    Both questions are rhetorical, but the latter drives me crazy because it implies that it’s okay if I can’t actually scare one up, that