Published in Issue 63.1: Winter 2024
Winner of the Inaugural James A. Winn Prize in Nonfiction
My son wakes up reaching for another’s body—How come you get to sleep with Papa? he asks, I want to sleep holding someone, and means: I want to be held. He pretends to be the thing undead, grunting and stretching out his hands towards another body, any body. His little sister’s is the closest, her eyes, her cheeks, her hair. He stomps and moans until his need for touch is met. He presses into walls and doors, but their inanimate caress won’t do.
* * *
Zombie, of West African origin, sonically resembles Kikongo zumbi, meaning “fetish,” as in
a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked, abnormally, to a particular object or part of the body.
* * *
I massage his back in motions we name animal and violence: bats slap his shoulder blades with my open palms; elephants come down along his spine in my heavy fists; a snake slivers the length of his back, almost burrowing at the neck; and then there are spiders and a whale, ostriches, a cheetah, and his favorite, knives, my fingers clenched together so the hand turns blade, chopping faster and harder so his exhaled sounds vibrate, and he laughs at the way sound stutters in his throat. Faster, he keeps asking, willing my body to be capable of more than it is.
* * *
Zombie is also linked to Kimbundu zambi, meaning “god”—creator, ruler, supreme being, spirit. Originally the name of a snake god, later meaning “reanimated corpse” in voodoo.
* * *
He refuses to believe something unseen can exist outside the body, even as his body edges closer to power and demands its own worship. I am a scientist, he repeats. And not just any kind, a herpetologist. And not dedicated to the study of just any reptile, but lizards, only lizards. I don’t know where the obsession started. I know obsessions are common for children on the autism spectrum, but this is his only one. Perhaps it began after I’d had a few margaritas walking down the cobblestone streets of Key West, while he ran after the wild chickens that roam freely there, his arms open to grab hold in embrace or pluck a fistful of feathers. He doesn’t remember, being only two then, but amid the hunt for plume, he saw a giant iguana for the first time. Or perhaps, an unrecognized part of him remembers everything.
Look, I pointed at the iguana, nearly the size of our son’s whole body then, and way up in a palm, staring off into the blue blend of sky and water. My son stared back at it with a glee that only comes in toddlerhood, when everything is new and wondrous, when fear is not known but felt, and only suddenly—a lightning strike or summer rain turned hail or the body’s postmortem death rattle.
Without warning, the iguana turned its head a sharp left to look directly at us. Its dewlap—the long dangle of neck—didn’t inflate as it would for intruders, just swayed in the ocean air like a flag of surrender. My son screamed, petrified, and clung to my leg to be picked up. He cried unconsolably. I don’t remember for how long or what it took to make him stop, or perhaps, an unwilling part of me knows it took only time and the constant pressure of my body. What I do know is that from that moment on, every stranger he saw along the way, he told: iguana scary.
Now, he begs for a pet lizard, the more terrifying in appearance the better. He dreams of a frilled-neck who can run on water like the gods he doesn’t believe in. He hisses and opens his palms on either side of his face the way the lizard would and chases his little sister around the house. I’m a zombie lizard, he yells, I’m going to eat you.
I ask why he loves them, these cold-blooded, scaley creatures he won’t be able to hug, and to whom he’ll have to feed grasshoppers and crickets and other critters he runs away from and hides his hands deep in his pockets so that they can’t jump onto his palms. Because they can camouflage, he tells me, they can hide in plain sight and only he can find them. Like my family, I think, Jews from Ukraine who came to this country as refugees and now almost pass as fully American. Almost. Until our tongues slip into a Slavic dialogue my husband tells me always sounds angry, like you’re screaming. Until our blood, always boiling, shows the red inside us. Until, getting off an airplane, my son asks the pilot,
Do you speak Russian?
And the smile slides off his face down his gold-trimmed uniform, “No! Why would I?” His offense is clear, frustration even. “I’m an American!”
To which I respond, I’m from Ukraine. We both speak Russian, and I’m an American too. Only half-believing my own expression of certainty.
Or, until older kids hear us speaking to one another on the elementary school playground days after Russia’s invasion of my birthplace. “What language is that?” they ask.
Russian, he replies, unafraid.
“You’re Russians?”
No, my mom’s from Ukraine.
“Good thing she got out,” they say, “Before the Russians killed her.”
Unfazed, he responds, She came a long time ago. And we continue to play, me reaching for him with outstretched arms as he climbs higher on the spider rope swing. We continue to hide, masking in plain sight.
He doesn’t tell them—because he doesn’t really know—why we came so long ago. How boys as big as he is now once threw stones at me in the courtyard of our Dnipro apartment high-rise. How they yelled Zhidovska devochka, naming me the slur for Jew. How my father grabbed them by their shirts when he saw it and threatened what he’d do if they ever got near his child again. How my mother doesn’t remember, having blocked out the anti-Semitism I experienced while remembering her grandfather murdered at Babyn Yar and the boys who beat up her brother for his nose and the schools she wasn’t allowed to attend because of hers. How Jewish, back there and then, was not religion—as all religion was forbidden in the Soviet Union. How it marked us inferior, unworthy, dirty, different, always different from the rest.
I read that the generic name of the frilled lizard, Chlamydosaurus, is derived from the ancient Greek chlamydo meaning “cloaked” or “mantled” and saurus meaning “lizard.” I do not ask my son if he wishes he could hide too, all these parts of us that rise to the surface of our skin, coming out of our mouths. I find him instead, and always, because no matter how loud he screams or cries or hurts or chases, most others choose to look away. Especially, once they have an answer to their questions. And even when staring straight at him, to most, he remains a body camouflaged among so many similar bodies, the unseen thing trapped inside, undetectable, almost. Until it is the only thing anyone can see.
* * *
Perhaps from Louisiana creole zombi meaning “phantom, ghost,” from Spanish sombra meaning “shade, ghost.”
* * *
He used to think he could speak Spanish too. Whenever anyone heard foreign speech pass between us on the playground or in the grocery store, they’d ask if it was Spanish, and before he was old enough to understand, he’d reply Yes, then mumble something he thought sounded like Hola, como estas. As he got older, he discovered which languages belonged to him. He’d reply, No, I speak Russian, but my mom speaks Spanish too. Now, he follows up immediately with, But she’s from Ukraine, knowing the weight our language carries, how it ties us to another place we never lived or belonged and how its ghost hangs over our mouths.
In response, strangers say, “I’m so sorry for your country, your people,” while my child has his way with any inanimate object on the playground. I can’t help think how easy it is to be sorry for something so distant, so foreign. They are only sorry for a faraway present. Much harder to see up close, my son, hitting me, hard, or trying to push his little sister off of something tall or kissing, hard too, as she screams No! Stop that. Until I pull him off of her. And every parent who was once so sorry for my country has looked away from the land on which they stand. How much harder it would be to say then, “I’m sorry for you, for your children.” Not that I crave their pity, in fact, I fear it, like the phantom sounds of my child stumbling towards my bed at night, again and again, to demand I take him to the bathroom or give him water or do any number of things he is old and capable enough to do on his own and yet refuses.
I see the way they look at us, exchanging words they don’t understand, which sound harsh and violent and cruel, and maybe there is truth to that. They won’t admit their pity or blame. It’s too proximate. Their hands, too close to being able to stretch out, to touch my shoulder, to feel it all on their own land, their own skin.
* * *
In English, tag, “children’s game,” is perhaps a variation of Scottish tig, meaning, “tap.”
* * *
The koi pond playground is between the elementary school and our house. About a five-minute walk downhill that takes twice as long because my legs are too tired and I can’t walk anymore and I need cold water, not this water and you have to carry me. So I do, carry all seventy pounds of him on my back, downhill, on a slip ’n’ slide of fallen leaves, soaked by days of rain. His palms tap soft against my chest to signal I keep going. He is careful to hold on to my shoulders, to avoid wrapping his forearms around my neck, having taken my breath too many times before, and left me coughing to catch it, refusing to pick him up again.
I can feel his heart beating through my back into my own chest, almost as if he were back inside of me—my heart the only certain rhythm, my body the only home. His sweat, too, soaks through my shirt into my spine. How much of motherhood is transferring fluid from one body into another?
* * *
Tag is probably an alteration of the Middle English word tek, meaning, “touch.”
* * *
That was so much fun he says, and means my body giving him a ride home, but also the game of zombie tag with older boys who asked if they could play with us. This might be a common childhood occurrence for neurotypical kids, but for mine, another child’s desire to play with him, instead of running the other way, is as longed for as touch.
The beauty of zombie tag is that it requires minimal effort on the part of the tagger, the zombie, the parent, who is most always me. As a zombie, I must move slow and grunt, every now and again, grumbling, Brain, I’m hungry for brain. I must reach for him, but always come up short. I cannot climb the monkey bars or tree or even the stairs to reach the top of the slide. Still, my outstretched arms and weighted steps cause him to run away from me in laps around the playground and scale every wooden or steel edifice and yell and laugh, exclaiming breathless, AHHH, the zombie, she’s gonna get me.
* * *
Also see: tick meaning “sound made by a clock” or to tick someone off originally “to reprimand, scold,” now meaning “to annoy.”
* * *
The older boys watched us at first, pushing one another on tiny tricycles made for children a third their size. Then, the taller one, with spaghetti-like hair stuck to the sides of his face, asked, Hey, can we play too. And with delight, my son replied, Sure, my mom’s the zombie. Do you even know how to play zombie tag? They ignored his question and joined the game, so I had to become a bit faster in my pace and farther in my reach to catch one of them, so they could take over being the zombie within the confines of the game. Rules, it’s critical to stick to the rules so my son doesn’t break out in a sob or throw himself on something harder than bone or at another’s soft body in frustration.
* * *
And unavoidably, see tick, a parasitic arachnid animal that survives by sucking the blood of a mammal. When it cannot find a host—a body to tick, tap, touch—it dies.
* * *
I tagged the smaller of the boys, though he told us he was in fact older. Hey, zombies can’t climb monkey bars, my son protested when the boy chose to make his zombie far more agile than mine—running, jumping, and even climbing to sit on top of the monkey bars. My son clung on to the rails with his hands, keeping a grip on the base with his tiptoes, so as not to let his feet dangle off the edge.
Brain, the boy hissed, his mouth open and edging closer towards my son’s head. I smell that yours is rotten, he chomped down loud enough for me to hear his teeth collide. I always stand close enough to grab my son—to save him from himself or to save someone else from him. It had never been the other way around. The boy’s grip wavered on the rain-slicked bars as he leaned closer to my son’s face.
Everyone’s brain is rotten, my child replied unmoving, his sweat-soaked curls practically inside the older boy’s mouth.
Yours is the most rotten, the boy retorted, and my child didn’t argue.
He knows his brain is different, and when he loses control, he tells others, I didn’t mean to, it was just my brain.
Excuse or explanation, the result is the same. They move as far away from his body as they can or if the children don’t, their parents tell them, I don’t want you to play with that boy anymore: [he pushed/kicked/scratched/punched/pinched/grabbed you] [pulled your hair] [spit in your face] [bit you] he is bad [insert violent act here].
I wonder if the older boy tasted my son’s sweat on his lips. If he knew it was different. If it reminded him of sea salt. Of the dead sea, perhaps. Of all the dead our people come from. I wonder if this boy knows death the way we do.
I wonder what would have happened if I didn’t make us leave when my son became the zombie. When he got be the one to open his mouth and reach for the flesh of another.
That’s a lie. I know exactly what would have happened. So instead, we make our slow way home, my body carrying his—an undead, unsinkable sea.
You can read the rest of this story and more great content in out Winter 2024 issue, available for purchase in print and digital forms here.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) is the author of three poetry collections, most recently 40 Weeks (YesYes Books, 2023). Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Brevity, among others. Recent awards include Hunger Mountain Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, ALR Poetry Prize, and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. Julia is working on a poetry collection and book of essays which grapple with raising a neurodiverse child with a disabled partner under the shadow of the war against Ukraine, Julia’s birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English at Denison University and lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio.
