SPLICED COLUMN /
ISSUE 06
DRAWING CONCLUSIONS
I died once. Very briefly, but died nonetheless.
I
t was peaceful - a kind of blissful emptiness that
has to be experienced rather than described - and
it was bright, very bright. And then it hurt. Then the
pain was like hellfire searing its mark on a fulcrum
point centred directly on my right temple. I wanted
to claw my way back to that peace, away from the
terrible screaming (which was my own) and would do
whatever it took to get back there.
No wonder the undead always seem so angry in
films... But that does technically mean that I'm a
zombie, which is awesome! It also means that I'm
not fully alive or dead, which is slightly concerning
and explains the strange blackness of my right big
toe and woeful predilection to head trauma. I'd like
to think that I'm not a festering corpse, so perhaps
I've been cursed in a muti ritual gone awry because a
vagrant witch doctor mistook my surname to mean
that I'm Whitcher than him/her rather than being the
monster-hunter/ basket maker genealogic meaning
(of which the former ALWAYS takes precedence) of
the surname.
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about (from a mix of broken bones and torn
ligaments usually) as a form of movement and nonresponsiveness to cold. People have often asked me
how I'm still alive today after all the things that have
happened to me and I normally shrug my shoulders
with an orchestral popping of joints in my shoulders,
and it weirds them out, but all I've known for most of
my life is grinding any gristle deep within my body.
Maybe my quest to have super-powers has
always been in vain, because I am, in fact, a
zombie already. This saddens me a bit, because
my pop-culture seat lies firmly in the realm of the
super-powered, not the mouldering corpse-camp.
I suppose Frankencastle1 was kinda cool (yes, I
actually did actually enjoy that) and Deadpool is
also technically a zombie and I adore the dude, so
maybe being undead isn't so bad after all.
My zombified state would explain the innate ability
to take damage and weather the myriad of strange
and interesting diseases that I've picked up over my
life. I mean, that whole dying thing happened when I
plummeted off of a waterslide and landed head-first
on nice, solid, unforgiving concrete. I'd fractured
my skull and given myself a massive concussion and
briefly shuffled off the mortal coil, but got better
(since we're going the whole Monty Python route
anyway) after two weeks of unbearable pain in a
hospital ward. Actually, I pretty much degraded into
monosyllabic grunts when people asked me things,
because it was too painful to say full sentences,
which again furthers my case.
So if you ever see a red-mohawked zombie wearing
inappropriately clashing colours hobbling down the
street, pay it no mind: I probably just broke another
bone in a way that'd make for an hilarious anecdote
later on. Plus, I don't even like tongue, so why would I
eat brains?
1 The Punisher was briefly turned into a
Frankenstein's Monster-esque zombie for a brief
run in the comics.
There's also my unhealthily pale skin, my ability
to repulse people within seconds, shambling
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