Editor’s note:
“Nowadays, people often respond to crises with laughable celebrity worshipping, irrational confidence, pseudoscience, or self-righteousness rather than practical thinking. Contemporary behaviors are something to be questioned and mocked. This piece of absurdist #satire takes a stab at how, despite all the narrator’s supposed knowledge, skills and self-beliefs, none of it matters because ultimately, we have Tom Cruise to rescue us.”
— Yunya, Features Editor
I looked around. There were zombies everywhere. Confused and feeling reasonably neurotic, I looked inside the hastily packed, unzipped backpack I picked up. A three-litre, glass water bottle obscured the rest of the stuff in the bag (a unicorn PillowPet® and dead phone), so I opened it and skulled the whole thing, letting it slip from my hand and smash onto the ground when I was done. The wind blew through my hair (also bringing with it a slight but nevertheless noisome stench, which resembled a familiar smell, but one I wanted to forget about immediately) – I knew just what to do. I gently let my bag fall onto the floor, slowly put my fists on the bony part of my hips, manspreaded my standing legs and heroically lifted my chin up to the heavens. I closed my eyes and slowly exhaled, imagining myself at the top of a very tall building, a marvellous cape billowing behind me.
The superhero stance.
My therapist told me it was the first step towards ‘diminishing your fears and surviving through the seemingly unconquerable quests of life’, so I stood there for a good minute, trying to diminish those fears, as the horrific and potentially death-inducing smell of uncooked brain meat doused in a disgustingly strong cologne, grew stronger and stronger. My ever-present human instincts (which I tried to get rid of, at the suggestion of my therapist, who took me to one of his bi-weekly meetings in which masked figures congregate around a large marble bowl, and bathe their pinky toes and the tips of their eyeballs into the ‘waters of Dory’s ancestors’), flicked my eyes open, and everything that I was trying to do with the whole superhero stance thing went out the window. Fuck Gerry. What was I paying three-hundred dollars a week for? The discounted non-vegan whale skin made gel eye patches and fifty-five-minute therapeutic toe-sucking service? I could’ve gotten those anywhere. I sighed (dramatically), just in time to see a zombie squelching straight towards me, leaving bits of its wet, booger-like skin behind with every footstep it took, in exchange for a bite of my skin. I don’t blame the zombie though, because I do have very nice skin. Like, flawless to the point where it’s concerning. It gets more and more porcelain-like every time I use this special moisturiser sunscreen hybrid cream, which my therapist says he (and all his faceless friends) swear by, because ‘donkey teeth enamel and the tears of childless forty-four year old female divorcees invigorate and sustain your conservatory system’ (when I asked him what that was, he told me that I wouldn’t find it in medical textbooks because ‘it’s too advanced for the medical community’, and that I could find a diagram on page five hundred and sixty-six of the manifesto, which he has mass printed into wallpaper in every room of his house). The zombie’s gaping mouth reached out towards my neck, and just as I was about to duck and run, the world stopped and everything began to move in slow motion. I peered inside the zombie’s mouth, curiosity coursing through my almost lifeless veins. It was a question I’d been asking for years, and now I would finally get an answer. Fast-paced glimpses, scenes even, like the ones you would see in a movie is all I could see inside the zombie’s mouth. There was no dangly thing at the back of his throat or any mouth stuff; just glimpses of so many things – a small, red dog galloping through the woods; a dude with a mohawk; a baby googoogaga-ing for the first time; the melting of a clay ball in a kiln; someone sniffing a cake instead of blowing the candles out; a dude with newly done eyeball tattoos being locked out of his iPhone because he forgot his passcode and his phone doesn’t recognise his face for face ID anymore; me right now, looking into the zombie’s mouth and about to be kidnapped by an incredibly talented celebrity who was valiantly swinging down from the top of a building to save me from the zomb- and just like that, moments away from being bitten and brain-dead forever, I was swinging through the air, unintentionally leaving my life, backpack and therapist behind.
*
I open my eyes and look around. I’m in a circular spaceship of sorts, which I’m guessing belongs to the FBI, because everywhere I look, the FBI logo stares back. I guess we’re in America now? I look out the window and realise we are hovering above the ground; below, panicked people are running around soundlessly (I guess the spaceship is sound proof? Or perhaps they really did lose their voices by screaming themselves hoarse?), as zombies drag their holder uppers across the ground in an attempt to bite and convert them (which sounds like something my therapist would be into). I look around the spaceship again and guess I was too blinded by the FBI logos to notice all the people here – it wasn’t just me. A lady beckons towards me and points to a note she hand-wrote, which basically said that the super cool hero celebrity was saving as many people as he could and helping them get into the ‘FBI (surprise surprise) Zombie Apocalypse Survival Pods’ which allowed humans to live in the sky and in these pods forever, so zombies could never get to them; until of course, they learn how to fly (I didn’t say this to the lady though, she looked older and had wrinkle lines; maybe I’ll mention my hybrid cream to her later). I stuck my head out the sliding doors, which opened up to the entrance of the spaceship. The multi-talented celebrity was all suited up and ready to go back into the thick of the zombie apocalypse to do some more selfless saving. Just as they were about to jump out, they looked back, and their gallant gaze met my adoring one. The Mission Impossible theme song began playing faintly from somewhere, maybe through some hidden, spaceship speakers or maybe I was imagining it, but who cares, because it was definitely playing and getting progressively louder with every second beat. He nodded his head at me once and just as the consecutive beats “dah dummed” he jumped out, once again proving that he is the coolest dude alive.
It was Tom Cruise.
He’s how I survived the zombie apocalypse.
“The Shallot” is Gamamari’s satirical news column, inspired by The Onion, delivering bite-sized satire through fictionalised, absurd takes on real-world events and societal issues. This thought-provoking column offers readers a playful critique of contemporary culture and politics in a style that parodies traditional journalism.