Elle ne parle pas

I have to take care of her again.

I don’t like being around her. She stares at me and groans. And she shuffles towards me, each step looking more sinister than the other, until she eventually smiles and sits down in a dusty old chair next to me.

She opens her mouth sometimes. Usually just to eat food, or to make more grunts. She makes most of her grunts with her mouth closed, which is a relief. Her breath stinks.

But you know, she is kind of nice. She’s a bit lost. Her skin is peeling, and her eyes are drooped but that’s ok. She still is always excited to see me, she grunts and drools and her eyes look so happy.

She does scare me a little.

Once, when she shuffled over to the chair next to me again, she fell. She tripped over a loose rock on the floor and fell right on top of me. She stank. The stench suffocated me and I thought I was going to die. But I didn’t. She grunted and got right back up. And all was well.

Papa makes me take care of her. He says he is working on a ‘cure’ for her. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what she is sick from. She is just a bit funny, that’s all.

Papa doesn’t like it when I talk about her in mean ways. He gets all angry and starts yelling – ‘Treat her like you would your own sister!’ -  and I start to cry, and he comes and cuddles me.

But the problem with her is that she doesn’t speak. I can’t hear what she says. She looks at me dead in the eye and grunts some more, drool dripping down her ragged old cloth shirt, and she looks like she could cry. She wants to talk to me. I need to talk to her.

It’s a shame she scares me.

Eventually Papa comes home with a big bag. He won’t tell me what it is. He tells me to leave the room with the girl and go outside or something. So I do, because I won’t upset Papa. I love Papa.

Which is why I recognise his screams so well.

I ran back into the room to see the bag ripped apart. Inside are apples. But not any old apples – golden apples. They are shining and beautiful. Next to the bag is my Papa’s limp bloody body.

Oh.

I scream and cry so hard that I don’t bother to notice the girl getting up from Papa’s corpse, wipe blood of her lips and start shuffling towards me.

She gets an inch away from me before I notice. I scream harder and grab a golden apple. She gets closer and closer, but she walks past me – and she goes to sit in the chair. She smiles at me like she always does. She never speaks.

I hold the golden apple at her and suddenly everything clicks – she is a zombie. Papa was trying to cure her. That was the cure.

I slowly passed a golden apple to her. She takes it shakily and begins eating it. And eating it. And she eats the entire thing.

Her stench retreats, her eyes look healthy. Her skin is glowing, and her hair is shining.

She is my sister.

And so I cry a lot and a lot because I don’t understand why my sister is her and why she killed Papa but that doesn’t matter because she’s hugging me. She tells me how proud she is of her younger sister and we walk out of the room and into the sun. We don’t talk about Papa’s body and we haven’t since.