Sweet Romance18 min read
My Dad, the Zombie Who Smoked Through His Eyes
ButterPicks14 views
I never thought the apocalypse would come like an argument I’d still be in the middle of.
"It’s the third day," I told the bowl of noodles, and then I chewed and realized it tasted like the packing salt had been a little too generous.
"You always do this," my mother said from her chair by the window. "You eat first and judge later."
She stared at the street and did not blink. Her eyelids stayed heavy like they were keeping a secret in. I had thought about my father before the thought stacked on top of its pile and kneaded itself into my chest.
"If Dad were here," I said, "we’d have real noodles. Not this... salted despair."
Angela Carpenter snapped her head to me like a hawk. "Go call your real father then. Why are you always talking about him like he's around to clean dishes?"
"I—" I started. "I don’t mean—"
"You say his name and it sounds like you’re summoning him. It’s wrong, Kiara."
We had been married once and then un-married; the house we kept was the small one she insisted on when they signed the divorce papers. Ely Bird had wanted a different life and then left. That was the old story. This new story had zombies outside and a thin wooden door that sounded like a drum every time something heavy stumbled by.
I called anyway. I dialed the number I knew better than my own and listened as it rang and rang and then—"The person you are calling is busy."
My heart did a small, stubborn hop.
Angela laughed once, short and brittle, and said, "Don't you go making me go out there to swing a frying pan at anyone who pops up."
"Mom—"
"Don't try to sweet-talk me."
"I’m not trying to sweet-talk you. I’m calling Dad."
She made a face like I'd offered her a rotten apple. "Why would you do that? He left. He had his freedom. Let him keep it."
I dropped the phone on the table and stared at the cracked screen like it held answers. The window showed silhouettes of the neighborhood, darker now with rot and shivering shadows. The thought of my father among them was... ridiculous, disgusting—impossible. Yet I couldn't stop thinking of the little things: how he triple-washed the noodles, the way he’d ruin a simple steak by fussing over the pan. Memories were small, stubborn embers.
Later, when I pulled open the curtain to peek down the stairwell, there was a shape by the little door.
"Is that…?" I whispered.
Angela's head turned. "Don't you even think about it. If it's a neighbor, we can't open. If it's—"
She didn't finish. Neither of us did. The shape moved, a heavy, lumbering presence that paused at the entryway of our building. It peered up the stairwell, and for a second I wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of it: the figure wore jewelry that jangled, an old shirt with faded logos, and carried an air like someone proud of their bad outfit choices. He looked wrong in a way that cut like a match.
"Ely?" I breathed, because how else do you name a thing that has become both wrong and familiar?
The figure turned, and the hallway light hit him. He was not human in the bright way we were used to. His skin seemed a smear of blue and grey and he moved with fits and starts. But when he turned, there was a small, stubborn familiarity—an angle of shoulder, the way he tucked his chin like he was embarrassed.
"Mom," I said, and I could have sworn my voice folded. "He looks like Dad."
Angela went pale, and her face reshaped into something I’d seen once before: when she found out about the divorce the first time. "Don't you be ridiculous, Kiara. It's a monster."
"But—"
"Shut up," she snapped. Then softer, "Or I'll make you shut up."
The thing lounged at the door for a week. At first, everyone else in the building avoided it. It should have been violent, ravenous, a threat. Instead, like clockwork, there were things left by the door.
They were small at first: a bag of ramen, a can of rice, a little cluster of dried fruit with a note on top written in shaky handwriting I recognized without seeing the name. Then larger things came—red dates, goji berries, a single pack of instant soup my mother liked. He left them in the dead of night, when the building was quiet and the zombies seemed to unhook from their hunger.
"That’s creepy," I told Angela. "Why would a zombie—"
"He’s not a zombie," she said.
"Then call him what else he is—he's a lunatic. He could have left supplies for the whole building. He keeps us safe and doesn't talk to us."
She pressed a hand to her stomach. "Does it matter? At least someone out there remembers we're humans."
For a while the question of who he was—what he was—hovered like a moth around the light. I started comparing the things he left to things Dad used to like. Triple-washed chicken. A tin of a tea brand he favored. Once there was a bowl of soup so salty it made my teeth ache, and it tasted like the way the house smelled when he’d been worrying—overcooked soy and the faint rustle of newspaper.
But then there was a message I got once, from an old number. "I’m with my girlfriend. Don’t worry." It arrived like a scalded note.
"See!" Angela spat. "There he is. He has some other woman."
I stared at the message as if the pixels could explain everything. "He—he's a jerk," I said, and my chest felt like it was being pinched. "How could he even—"
"People change," Angela said flatly. "You know how people change."
The days passed. Food grew scarcer. The building's little wooden door had a slat now, a crack with a personality. Explosions of sound came from outside—groans, the occasional smack as a group of the undead tried a neighbor’s door. Each time, I thought of that bag on the step and the figure that left it. Sometimes I caught him looking up the stairwell as if listening.
"He's scouting," I said once. "He's more than a—"
"Stop," Angela hissed.
He came back to the door every other day after that. I watched him from the peephole: he sat on the common landing, legs swinging, face turned up at nothing. He pretended at indifference and, somehow, in that pretended indifference, there was a kind of guarding. Nobody else came near when he was there. The hallway, once strewn with corpses and the smell of old life, began to feel cleaned as if someone had swept the rot away at night. The undead that normally shambled by seemed to avoid our building entirely.
"Maybe he's the reason," I said.
"Maybe he is a menace," Angela countered. "Or maybe he has a plan."
I wanted to know. So I started to sneak.
"Kiara," my mother sniffed one afternoon as I fumbled with the latch. "If you go out there, don't come looking for me."
"I won't," I lied. "I'll be careful. He can't be more dangerous than the rest."
I opened the door a sliver and slipped out. The light hit him and for a second I almost forgot to breathe.
"Ely?" I said. "Dad?"
He stared at me with that flat, milky look and then he jerked slightly, as if pulled by a string. He had a small notebook and a stubby pencil he would show me—he had started learning to write words again on the tiny slips people left. When I put my hand on the stair rail, his head turned and the lips moved. He couldn't form speech so he began to write on his small pad with a stub of a charcoal pipe he’d found.
"No," he scrawled at me, and that was the first time I recognized his handwriting, the first time I recognized the little curl he used in his lowercase 'y'.
He wasn't a monster and he wasn't entirely himself.
"Are you kidding me?" I whispered. "So you’re—"
He wrote, "I’m not a monster."
"Then what are you?" I asked. "What does this mean?"
He didn't answer. He put a small packet on the step: red dates in a paper bag, tied carefully, a note written on a business-card-sized scrap. The handwriting trembled.
"For Angela," it said. "From Ely."
I couldn't help it. I laughed and cried at the same time. "What is wrong with you?" I said. "Why would you do that?"
He looked like he wanted to grin. The thing that should have been a grin trembled, but he did something I recognized: he tapped his chest like he used to when he reached into his pockets for a cigarette and couldn't find one, a gesture I had seen him do thousands of times.
"Because," I said aloud, because the word felt loud and honest that day, "because he can't help it."
That night I broke one of the rules my mother had about honesty and sneaked into the landing to leave him a note.
"Do you have a name you prefer?" I asked. "Do you remember anything of before?"
In the morning there was another bag—this time goji berries and a single pack of instant soup—and under it a tiny scribble.
"For Kiara," it said. "I remember the way you smashed eggs. I remember how you never let me win at checkers."
I held that scrap like it was a medal. I folded it into my shirt and hid it.
From there, the routines knitted themselves into our new lives. He left food. He kept other zombies away by being a heavy presence. His behaviors were a map across his remaining humanity—he maintained rituals. He smoked, but the smoke didn't come out of his mouth. It rose thin and curling from his eyeballs like two tiny white flags.
I told Angela as much. She made a face like it was indecent to laugh and then laughed. "You always said he was dramatic," she said. "He'll be dramatic forever."
The rumor about a "girlfriend" stuck anyway, written in texts and muttered by neighbors over their microwave dinners. Once, an old cousin, Dawson Conner, called.
"Are you okay?" he asked. "Have you seen him? Is Ely with you?"
"He's here," I said. "He's outside our door. He's trying to... help."
Dawson's voice trembled. "Are you sure? The rescue teams hit your area. There's been a sweep. They say everyone was moved."
"They might have missed a few people," I said. "He's been leaving things at our door."
"Did you ever hear from him before the sweep?"
I told him about the message. "He said—'I'm with my girlfriend.'"
Dawson's laugh was a dry sound. "Of course he'd say that. Ely never did anything the easy way."
It was typical of our family conversations: clipped, sharp, then soft until we filled in the blanks without even trying. I kept the scraps of paper he wrote on hidden under the rice canister, then under the third floorboard, then in the small shoebox where I kept paperclips and a level that no longer functioned. They were everything to me—a breadcrumb trail that made him human.
"Okay, you listen," Angela said one night, ironing something like she always did when thinking. "If anyone asks, you tell them he was never more than a good man who got lost. And Kiara—if he is dangerous, you do not let him near me."
"He guards the building," I said. "Are you even listening to yourself? Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?"
"Don't you go soft on me," she warned, and then her voice broke. "Don't be like him."
I thought I knew the man who'd left. I thought I knew his mistakes, his abandonments, his stupid small moments of misplaced pride. But watching him scrape for humanity at our door changed something. It didn't melt the wrongs from my memory, but it painted them in a softer color.
One of the nights he left a large plastic bag with a Walmart logo. Inside it was a bounty: bags of noodles, rice, eggs, and, as if he had peeked into the most secret corner of my mother's heart, five dragon fruits. Angela cried when she saw them and then scolded me for laughing.
"Whoever left these has my heart," she wobbled.
"If it was a prank—"
"No, if a prankster goes out and buys goji berries at the height of this, they have dedication."
We never found out who else might have been involved. The hallway remained awkwardly tidy.
The more he left, the more suspicious the world got. People called. Dawson called again to say rescue teams might be rerouting. "They cleared your sector," he insisted. "I swear to God."
"Then why is he outside our door?" I asked. "Why didn't he go with them?"
"Maybe he didn't want to," said Dawson. "Maybe he couldn't."
"Could what?" I asked. "Speak?"
Sometimes when I watched him from the staircase he would tap an old ringtone he still had set on his phone, right where the old message had been. The ringtone was the most absurd little thing: a singer crooning a sentimental song about returning home. It made me laugh until it made me sad.
One day—maybe it was the twentieth day of all this—my phone rang. It was a number saved under my father's name. It vibrated like a ghost. "That's his ringtone," I told Angela. "He used to set it so he could find his phone in the couch."
"Then answer," she said.
My hand shook as I picked up. "Hello?" I said.
On the other end, a voice answered that I had only heard in my nightmares and in sleep-deprived reminiscences.
"Kiara," the voice croaked like a winter branch rubbing—a voice that was mine when I was too young to fight. "I'm busy."
I slammed the phone down, then did what any rational person would do: I opened the door.
He stood there, the figure who had been our guardian and our horror. When he saw me, the whole figure went still, then pivoted like a scarecrow on a stake. He turned and sprinted, but not away from the building—toward the stairwell. He dropped the phone. The screen flashed "busy" and then died.
"Don't go," I whispered, then shouted, "Ely! Stop!"
He ran anyway. He kept running because he had the inertia of habit. He was a man who had never burned a bridge clean, who always kept something in his pocket he thought he might need later. Now he ran because something raw in him demanded a direction.
The bag he dropped contained receipts and a small, folded note:
"I made up the 'girlfriend' story," it read. "I thought if you thought I was elsewhere, you'd stop worrying. I was afraid."
I fell apart on the stair. I laughed and sobbed the same way people do when a dam breaks.
I couldn't keep holding the truth in my hands as if it were fragile china. One morning when the sun made the hallway look less terrifying, I walked out to him and called, "Dad."
He stopped. His head tilted. He took that small, awkward step forward like he'd performed a piece of theater a hundred times. And then he did—he placed his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.
"You look smaller," he wrote, and then he stared at the page.
"You're full of it," I said. "You look the same."
He blinked. The cigarette he had always pretended not to be attached to was gone. He tapped his pockets, revealed a pack of smokes that had somehow survived the chaos, and then with childish pride he showed me how the smoke came out: not from his mouth but from his eyes. It made a thin, ghostly ribbon that climbed the stairwell and disappeared.
"It freaks Mom out," I said. "She thinks it's gross."
He wrote, "She's the queen of my heart."
Whenever he got close enough, something strange happened to the building. The stairwell didn't smell like rot. The neighbors left a plant on the landing without asking who left it. A little girl across the hall whispered "Thank you" into the stairwell when she thought no one was watching. He protected the building from other undead the same way a watch dog protects a garden from rabbits: a tiring stubbornness.
Time rolled weird then—days sticky like jam. We rationed, we planned, we pretended to be okay. Angela kept her routines: flowerpots in the window that grew like the world demanded they keep trying, ironing, and an obsession with a little white dress she wore sometimes as if testing the idea of being pretty in a world that forgot how to notice.
"Ely," Angela asked one afternoon when we were packing the car to go somewhere early rescue had suggested, "do you want to come with us?"
He wrote, "No."
"You have to come," I insisted. "They’ve got doctors. There might be a fix."
He shook his head. "No," he wrote again, and then added, "I need to watch. I need to wait."
"Wait for what?" I demanded.
"For you," he wrote.
The truth about us was complicated. He had left once because he thought leaving was an answer to being unsayably unhappy. But in this wrecked world, he would not leave us again. He became a guard the way some people become saints—clumsy, stubborn, occasionally grotesque, but fixed.
We left at some point. The rescue was not glamorous. Our van was not a Maserati despite Ely's old jokes about cars no one could afford. It sputtered and coughed through the city like a wounded horse. I drove, though it was Angela who could handle the gears like she’d invented them.
We were three people in a small metal trap, with a man who could not speak but loved and protected us in the strangest ways. He was both a relic of his former arrogance and the last stubborn truth of our family.
On the road he went through fits. One moment he'd be lucid and tender, tucking a scrap of paper into my hand. The next moment he'd react to the tiniest hint of blood like a dog hearing supper—sloppy, desperate, and frankly terrifying. Once, while we sped past a pack of other undead tearing at a woman's arm, the smell made his muscles tighten and he started to thrash.
"Get him inside!" Angela hissed.
He howled like a man at a funeral and then, in a rhythm that had the sudden logic of the insane, he sat in the dirt and started to pound at the ground with his head. He began to bite his own forearm until his hands were covered in black blood. I grabbed him, and he reached for me and mouthed the words he couldn't make. He wrote, "Sorry," on a small whiteboard we had brought for emergencies.
"Don't," I said. "Please don't."
He stopped, as if a hand had vertically lifted a curtain. He crouched, eyes red and wet, and then he jumped up and shrugged off the scene like confronting a bad dream. He fought the other zombies like someone waking up every time and having to decide again how to be. He pushed them away when they came near, and sometimes he saved us with an inch of his own steadiness. His awareness flickered like an old lamp.
On the long stretch to the research center, when the countryside rolled by in patches of burned grass and once-happy lawns, he found a length of rope and handed it to me like it was a gift.
"To tie him up?" Angela asked, half-laughing.
He wrote, "Tie me up. So I can't buy you dresses."
"You're ridiculous," I said.
He wrote, "I am ridiculous and I like you."
We drove and we argued and we sang—Angela liked to sing off-key when she believed no one could hear. Once she put on a white dress in the dead of a rest stop and looked at Ely like he was a man again. He brought her a small folded shirt he had washed with bottled water, and when she put it on her face did a tiny wrinkle and then a smile bloomed like it had been rehearsed forever.
"My queen," he wrote, and she wriggled her fingers at him like a princess and then turned to me with wet eyes and said, "You see?"
I nodded. "Yes."
We reached the research center like a trio out of time. A young man with a rifle and a skeptical frown met us at the gate—Garrett Bertrand. He looked like someone who had been thrust into a terrible audition that required him to decide how much he believed the world. He kept a distance at first, then he listened to our story because the desperation in my voice made him curious.
"Can he be treated?" I asked Garrett.
He chewed a pen like a truth-teller. "Maybe," he said. "We’ve been experimenting. It's unproven, but…"
They took Ely in and kept him under watch. I sat outside the glass for hours and watched him, certain the whole time that this would be the final scene where we lost him. He'd been a skeleton wrapped in old flesh at times, and at times he had the warmth of someone who remembered how to make tea.
"Kiara," Garrett said once when I got up to ask about progress. "There's a ten percent success rate."
"Ten percent?" I laughed, and it sounded like a sob. "That's better than none, right?"
"It’s something," he conceded. "We need tissue responses, neural reconditioning. The person inside has to be responsive."
"They say your father has a hold of normal cognition," a doctor in a flannel jacket said. "That makes you a unique case."
They pushed him into surgery. We sat in a waiting room full of other people who smelled of lavender and fear. Angela played cards on her phone to keep from screaming. She lost all 120k beans on a game called 'Domino Kings' and then pretended like she had done it for strategy.
"You're weird," I said.
"I'm not weird," she muttered. "I'm strategic."
We waited. We stood and paced and tried not to imagine the worst. It was the longest short day of my life.
When he emerged from anesthesia, he looked less like a poster for a horror film and more like someone being unfrozen. There were lines in his face, and his eyes had a light that wasn't smoke but actual living light. He blinked the way people blink when their mission is to wake up. He took one long, trembling breath and then, with a small crooked grin the way he used to when he hated how something smelled, he said the first sentence he'd been missing since he became other.
"Do you still want to marry me?" he asked Angela, and his voice was a child's crazy hope that went straight to me.
Angela stared—then laughed, the kind that was wet and real. "Ely Bird," she said. "You are impossible. You are a lunatic."
"I am not a lunatic," he said, and even then his mouth quirked. "I just... needed time to figure out how to be the man who buys the right flowers."
"What man?" I asked.
"The one who buys the white chrysanthemum and thinks you've never been more than a small girl," he said. "The one who pretends he's above romance and is just stupidly, stupidly in love."
They didn't get married in cap and veil in that cold antiseptic room. But later they sat in the sunny courtyard and she put the white dress back on because she liked the way it made her both ridiculous and brave. He chewed a piece of cardboard like it was a toothpick and tapped his chest; he had made notes for her, little lists of things he'd fix—like the cabinet that always stuck, the heater knob that was bent.
"Can you promise me something?" Angela asked.
He looked and then wrote on a small pad: "I will stop leaving bags unnoticed. I will call. I will be stupid but present."
"Will you?" she asked.
He nodded, leaning forward. His eyes—no, his eyeballs—didn't smoke, not anymore. The doctors had done something that made the smoke stop and the words return. They had, with science and a grit I did not know they had, found a way to prune the infection at the edges and let the person inside decide.
The next weeks were a collage of small, tender reunions and awkward apologies. Ely and Angela circled one another like teenagers who had skipped school and then came back to find the same town. He told me the story, from his perspective, about the day he'd left. He said he had seen something he didn't understand and panicked. I thought of the man who’d been too proud to be romantic and then turned into a creature that smoked from its eyes; I thought how fragile edge-of-sanity decisions were.
"Why didn't you tell us about the food?" I asked him one day.
He blinked and wrote slowly on a pad I handed him. "I thought if you knew I was out there you'd stay inside. I didn't want you to fear. Or maybe I feared for you and wanted to be of use invisibly. I was an idiot."
"You were an idiot," I said, but my voice had a smile.
"Good," he wrote. "I am still an idiot."
It was not a fairy tale. The world beyond the research walls was damaged and crooked. People lost fingers and patience. But somewhere in the center, under the long gray sky and the smell of machines, family had pulse. We rebuilt routines. Angela went back to ironing like a ritual. I went back to making soup and being a daughter. Ely started, awkwardly, to relearn how to be a man who could sign a name and call on birthdays.
And yet there were small moments that made me grateful for the weirdness of what we'd been through. Once, as a joke, Ely pretended to light a cigarette but instead put a tiny paper tube to his eye—an old habit—and made a slow puff of imaginary smoke. We all burst into laughter like it was a party.
"You used to be a big show-off," Angela said, adjusting the little white dress's sleeve. "You never did small deeds well."
"I still do large deeds poorly," he grinned.
"He smokes through his eyes," I teased. "And now he’s back."
"Don't joke," he said, finger wagging. "It's a habit I had to quit."
The house we had once fought over, the small wooden door that had survived rot and fear, turned into our shrine of what we had survived. Every time a bag appeared again after a storm, someone sent another neighbor's thanks up the stairs. We kept a notebook in the kitchen into which Ely wrote like he had new energy—lists of what to buy, notes on what flowers were finally the right shade of white, a line about how he would never again put pretenses before being present.
One evening, sitting on the porch steps with the world quieting like a tired animal, I asked him one last question.
"Why did you fake the girlfriend?" I demanded, laughing because the question still bit.
He smiled slow like someone who remembered a joke and then realized the punchline wasn't funny. He wrote, "I was jealous of the things you had that I could not give. I wanted you to look away and stop expecting. I am an idiot who thought running would fix things."
I reached for his hand and he took mine like a man who had been given back his map.
"It almost got worse," I said.
"It almost did," he admitted.
We looked past the street, past the rubble. In the far distance, a helicopter hummed like a question, a promise. The little white dress lay folded on a chair beside us, and a notebook with lists and loose scraps of paper filled the table. On the top of the pile, in his shaky, reformed handwriting, he had written: "For Kiara—don't be foolish. Eat your noodles hot."
"That's him," I said. "He'll always be him."
"Yes," Angela said. "And that's enough."
There was no triumphant reunion with choir music. The world outside still stunk. The undead still roamed in parts like a grotesque tide. But inside our door there was a new routine—one that involved coffee, lilting sarcasm, and small offerings left upon our steps, always with notes. The notes changed tone from "From Ely" to "From Ely, who could have died but didn't" and that made the difference.
"Do you ever get tired of winning at protecting things?" I asked him once, teasing.
He shrugged and wrote, "I get tired of losing you."
"Then don't lose us again," I said, and the order bounded between us like a tether.
He looked at us—the two women he had loved in as many different ways—and then at the notebook in his hands, where he had written a list of things he would do differently. He turned the page and under "Things to Fix" he had written "1. Fix the heater 2. Learn how to be romantic 3. Be home for dinners."
"That's feasible," Angela said.
"That's everything," I said.
At night, I sleep with that list tucked like a comfort against the cold. Every time I hear a creak in the hallway—whether it's the undead or some other sound—I think of all the scraps of paper he left, the way his hands still wrote little loves. I think of how small acts can anchor people even when the sky is falling apart.
And the little wooden door at the end of our hallway? It is still there. It has a new scuff mark near the bottom. People point at it when they come to visit, and we tell them the story. They laugh and they cringe and sometimes they ask for another dragon fruit. Ely obliges if he can, and if he can't, he writes a note and tucks it beneath the rice can, and the house smells for a moment like something that couldn't be erased by rot.
Once, when I had been away for a day to help unload a supply truck, I came home and found an extra note folded neatly under the door knob.
"For Kiara," it read. "If you ever doubt, remember the way your mother wore that stupid white dress and made my heart triple. Remember the noodle you spat out because it was salty and we joked. Remember me."
I folded that note into my pocket and kept it for days like it was a jewel. The world could have been anything; I had been given more than a life—I had been given a man who had returned, not because he was perfect, but because he had tried.
"You did the weirdest, luckiest thing," I told him once on the porch.
"What was that?" he asked.
"Making sure we never ran out of dragon fruit."
He grinned, the small man who had been a storm. "It was the most sensible thing I did."
In the end, I learned to judge people by the small, ridiculous things they do when the world breaks: the cigarettes that come from the wrong place; the bags of food that arrive with no explanation; the white dress that still fits like a throne. We build our new lives from this rubble, and we keep the wooden door closed against what we cannot fix. But when it needs protection, there's a man at the step, writing notes and leaving small gifts, trying to be the person he should have been all along.
"Eat your noodles hot," Ely wrote once, as if that was an instruction for living.
"I will," I promised.
The End
— Thank you for reading —