Zombie Pink (9 page)

It's not fair
! Mimi thought, yet again.

Those words had become a never-ending mantra.

You have no control over what shape your face is or how your features go together or how thick your hair is
, Mimi thought.
No control at all! And the world judges your worth by how you measure up physically.

"It's not fucking fair!" Mimi grumbled.

Mimi's long face made her look older than her age, which wasn't fair either.

She thought of Janine, giggling and whispering with her husband at the picnic, her long thick hair swaying sexily over her bare shoulder. Janine probably smiled at herself in the bathroom mirror. She probably smiled and blew kisses at her reflection

Mimi tried to smile at herself in the mirror. Her smile looked monstrous...more like a grimace than a smile.

Suddenly, there was a loud knock on the bathroom door. The noise jolted Mimi out of her haze of self-despair and startled her.

"OH!" she cried.

"Are you still cleaning in there?" Roger asked in a sarcastic tone, which meant that he knew Mimi was definitely not cleaning in there.

Mimi burst out the bathroom door, knocking Roger back against the wall.

"Hey, watch it!" he growled. "What the fuck is your problem? What the hell have I done?"

"Go fuck your girlfriend!" Mimi snarled.

Roger was good looking. He had a rugged face, and his features were perfectly spaced. He had thick dark curly hair and a bushy mustache that fit him to a "T." Plus, he was built.

Mimi was sure her husband had no clue what it was like to live
with your mouth a mile from your too-big nose, or what it was like to have wispy hair the color of dull rust that just hangs on your head like yesterday's spaghetti.

No clue at all!

”
I'M GOING FOR A WALK!" Mimi roared.

Then she raced out the front door, not even waiting for a reply.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mimi stormed out the front door, slamming it
Roger's face.

That was the last straw. Whatever empathy Roger
felt for his unhappy new wife had now been
replaced with red hot fury.

No one slams a door in his face, by God! Not even his fucked
-up insecure wife
!

Those things Mimi said about Janine? Sure the woman was hot. Anybody could see that, including Roger, who wasn't blind. And sure he joined in with all the "guy talk" at the office... like what a nice "tight package" Janine was. Hell, he had to join in or he'd be in danger of losing his job
...or worse, the guys would label him a pussy!

Mimi didn't understand that. She thought his life was so damn easy. She lived in her own neurotic little bubble of insecurity, apart from the rest of the world.

But he also knew that a hot woman like Janine was great for business. She scored the big sales, damn it! Janine nailed the A.T.&T. job that was, to date, their biggest job yet. Yea, the world shouldn't work that way. But it did, and that wasn't
Roger's freaking fault.

He wasn't cheating on Mimi
with Janine. That's not the kind of guy he was, and his wife should know that. She should trust him, not hurl fake accusations at him simply because she was so damn insecure about her own looks.

Roger stormed out the door and slammed it behind him just as his wife had done. Mimi was already out on the street, marching
purposely down Candlepin Avenue, arms crossed. Her shapeless blue cotton Walmart dress fluttered wildly in the breeze, which had really picked up since dinner.

It appeared as though a storm was brewing. There definitely was a storm brewing in Roger.
She was going to explain herself, damn it
! Or at least admit she needed some help...

Maybe if she did more with her hair, Roger thought angrily. Maybe if she wasn't so damn lazy. Maybe if she bought some decent clothes that fit her right...

Mimi knew Roger would follow her. To be honest, she wasn't really sure why she was acting this way. She knew, in the deepest recesses of her heart, that Roger probably wasn't having an affair with Janine.

But she was so afraid he would
!

Why did women like Janine even have to exist? The world would be such a better place if they didn't.

Mimi was so sick and tired of feeling ugly. It really does something to a person. Really messes with their ego.

Maybe if she had some special talent it wouldn't matter so much. Like if she was really good at oil painting or playing the flute or singing or Lacrosse.

But she wasn't. She wasn't good at anything. Most of the time she felt like a complete waste of space.

Even her family wanted nothing to do with her, it seemed. If they did talk to her, it was only to offer "suggestions" which were really subtle ways of putting her down.

Like Mimi's sister's dumb suggestion to cut her hair.

"Some people don't look good with long hair!" her older sister Francesca, who just happened to have a short round face, proclaimed
. "It pulls your face down even more."

"Yea..." Mimi had said, feeling thoroughly offended.

Later on though, as she sighed at her ugly face in the mirror... a face that always looked sad (Mimi was sure that horrible joke when someone asks the horse, "Why the long face?" really applied to her, and it wasn't funny at all) she concluded that maybe Francesca was right.

So she made the hair appointment. Perhaps a cuter, shorter, more uplifting hair style would indeed
lift her face up.

However, the smug Asian hairdresser didn't seem very enthusiastic about working on Mimi, as though the hairdresser knew she was a hopeless case. And now Mimi was convinced she looked more hideous than ever.

Cute girls just don't understand what it's like to look in the mirror and hate what you see, Mimi thought, angrily.

"MIMI! SLOW DOWN! WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU GOING?" Roger yelled from behind her.

Nowhere
, Mimi thought.
Absolutely nowhere
.

Suddenly, on the DeFazio's front lawn, Mimi saw this strange woman. She wasn’t one of the
DeFazios
. Perhaps she was a relative visiting? She
didn't look like a relative, though. She
looked more like a homeless woman.

She was just standing there, staring at Mimi with a blank expression on her face. Well really, it was more of an evil expression with a slight smirk on her lips.

In the bright light of the DeFazio's decorative lawn ornament, the woman appeared dirty, and her skin had a sickly pinkish purple tint with an angry rash of exploding boils and
pustules erupting all over.

The big fake hipster-like glasses - not unlike the ones Mimi had purchased in an attempt to shorten her face - looked incongruous on the woman's fucked-up face.

The way the woman stood there in one place, staring, was so unusual and unnerving, that Mimi halted her self-engrossed march up the street and froze - right there in the middle of Candlepin Avenue.

She stared right back at the woman.

"Mimi!" Roger exclaimed, catching up to her.

Roger assumed
his wife had a change of heart and that was the reason she had stopped.

"Let's talk. Come on. Nothing can be that bad!” Roger insisted. I'm not having an affair with Janine, damn it. She acts that way with everyone. I told you...that's how we get the sales."

Truthfully, Roger really did want to work things out with Mimi. Okay, so he wasn't happy with his wife at the present moment. But he knew there was more to her than this anti-social, depressed jealous maniac she
had been
acting like lately.
The real Janine was still in there - somewhere - buried underneath.

Mimi had been so sweet when they were dating.

She must be going through some personal shit
, Roger thought.
Maybe it's a medical problem
....

That's when Roger saw the strange woman on the DeFazio's lawn.

"What the..." he started to say.

T
he woman just stood there, staring at Roger out of her
chalky white soulless eyes. She bared her teeth, just slightly, and a small growl escaped from between her thin dried-up
lips.

Her eyes...they were so white they practically glowed! And her skin...it was such an odd color. It was this almost translucent magenta with black spots and blisters and bright red patches all mottled together.

"Ehhhh...." the woman growled, slowly moving towards the shocked couple.

"Is this some sort of joke?" Roger asked, taking a few steps back. "Are you doing
like a cosplay thing for Dead Heads or something?"

Roger had caught the popular show a few times, and he knew there was a character named Blakely who wore giant black-framed hipster glasses.

"I dunno
," Mimi answered, as though Roger had asked her the question.

Mimi felt paralyzed there in the middle of the street, like she was in one of those dreams where
your legs turn to rubber and they're of absolutely no use.

She had become the proverbial deer in the headlights.
She
literally
couldn't move. No one else was around. There was just one light on in the DeFazio house, upstairs....

"Alright, enough is enough!" Roger ordered. "Great costume,
lady, okay?"

Although, the woman wasn't really wearing a costume - aside from the glasses.
She wasn't wearing anything unusual at all... just plaid sleep pants, some sort of sparkly flip-flops, and a light blue T-shirt.

But her face wasn't normal. Her expression...her eyes.....her movements.....

She was shuffling slowly and methodically, making a B-line straight over to
Mimi.

"Mimi, come on!" Roger commanded. He was attempting to sound tough to cover up his sudden apprehension. "This person isn't right."

He thought that maybe the woman was
high or sick or something.

"Let's get the hell out of here!"

But Mimi couldn't move. She tried, but she just couldn't.

Roger sighed and whipped his smartphone
out of his back pocket.

First, he snapped a picture of the woman. Then he said, "Hate to do this," and dialed 9-1-1.

The woman was slowly closing in on his wife.

"Mimi!" Roger called.

"Meeee..." the woman growled, as though she was trying to imitate what Roger had said.

"Damn it!" Roger swore.

For some reason, his call wouldn't go through. All he got was a busy signal.

9-1-1 wasn't working? What the hell
?

"Fuck!" Roger said.

The sickly woman was now about two feet away from Mimi. Her fucked-up mouth was twist
ed into some weird other-wordly
smile. Roger heard someone coughing from a window in the house behind him.

"HEY!" he shouted. "HELP! HELP! COME OUT HERE!"

Whoever was coughing disappeared.

The light
in the DeFazio house suddenly switched off.
Roger
thought he saw a curtain rustle in the main window downstairs. However, no one appeared to be rushing to their aid.

Roger reached out for his wife. Just as he grabbed her arm, the strange woman grabbed Mimi's other arm and emitted the most horrendous inhuman
shriek Roger had ever heard. .

"HEY! HEY! COME OUT HERE! WHERE IS ANYONE?" Roger yelled frantically, tugging at his wife.

However, Roger’s formidable strength was no match for the power of this evil grinning woman who easily yanked his wife away.

As the woman's twisted demented face closed in on Mimi, all Mimi could do was stare, as though she was in a trance.

"Even you look better than me," she murmured.

After that, all Mimi heard was Roger yelling and the sick squishy noise of teeth digging into her ear. The
woman bit off her earlobe!

The pain was like nothing she had ever experienced before in her life.

B
ut at least the excruciating physical pain helped Mimi forget the even more excruciating emotional pain of being
ugly.