She hated waiting on the other Zombies in the restaurant. Their pliant postures and self-deprecating jokes fogged the air with the stink of their cigarettes and the sharp alcohol scent of their highballs. The gin sloshed in their glasses as they awkwardly kissed up to their sleek vampire cousins.

The day I turned 18, I went to the enlistment office and signed up. Growing up, every time I looked at the flag, I was proud and knew I wanted to serve. My father was military and so were my older brothers.

My first day in, I was issued Army fatigues, had an ID chip implanted in my arm and told to report to the C-Center. The Center was a typical military building, concrete block painted dark green.

“Steve Nichols, reporting,” I said to the sergeant behind the desk.

Back when I was still a child, brooding and defeated inside one of the crumbling tenements located south of Brooklyn, I had grown to be suspicious of the lingering aroma of stale sweat and liquor in my father’s breath. It reminded me of how much death there was to endure while life went on.

Eleven year old Sadie Stevens sat on the edge of the sandbox in Stockden’s town park. It was bright and sunny and the park was full of kids, none of them near Sadie or her sandbox. She was making designs in the sand with a stick. She wore a red polka-dot dress that was besmeared with chocolate stains and had her blonde hair in two short pigtails. She had a stack of old looking leather bound books by her side.

“Hey slimy Sadie,” hollered Brendan Bogdanovich, Sadie’s sworn enemy, from the monkey bars.

Rosie was all blood and bawling in her arts and crafts room, wiping gray eyes with child fists, sticking her black hair together. Her hot tears melted eye shadow, dripping lines down her face, lines much like the dark tattoos on her back and her legs and her arms. Those tattoos and her age and her body all belonged to someone who was too old for the crayons and construction paper all around Rosie, but she still liked them as much as she liked knives and scalpels and the needles that had licked tattoos onto her body.

. . . tap, tap, tap . . .

He welcomed the soft earth when it became his grave, and when his flesh had rotted away, he thought he might be free, but no, his spirit was much stronger than the soft meat that animated his bones.

“Please, just let it go,” Yancy said to the cops who couldn’t hear him. One of them was standing on the roof of the cruiser with a pair of binoculars. He had heard about this. It was “Click it or Ticket” month nationwide, and this was how they cracked down.

He watched as the cop kind of hesitated, like he had just saw something strange or felt something in his body he had never felt before.

“That’s it. Pretend you don’t see me. Go on to the next person.”

At 4:52 PM, a delivery man, rushed and late on his route, drops a brown package on the stoop of 721 Haven Avenue. The package is clearly labeled in large, block letters: Dr. Kiekhoffer, 723 Haven. Something tinkled inside the box as it landed.

By 5:00, a small line of hungry, red dots trail from the box.

The first time I killed a man I was eight years old. He cried incessantly while I kicked at the back of his head with my brothers doing the same. My father watched as the man said, “Not me, god not me,” over and over, trying to stress, I suppose, that we were confused about who we were killing. We weren’t. We killed to watch the gore and test the limits of our breaking world. Who wasn’t something we were interested in. We were scorpions scuttling in the sand, benthic kraken pups, empty, empty.

"Behave, you monster!"

Seconds ago, my son declared war on a box of Corn Flakes and began throwing its contents around our shopping cart in a cheerful manner. I grab the box and try to replace it on the shelf without causing a scene. A prompt scream followed by a river of tears ruin my attempts.

Two concerned mothers nearby turn towards me, their angelic kids in tow. I try to make a quick escape and accidentally slam into a shelf. As boxes of cereal rain around us my son grins ear to ear.