While literary scholars have long known that Ernest Hemingway spent considerable time in Key West, most experts were under the now mistaken assumption that all of his Florida-based activity occurred at his famous Whitehead Street Residence. However, at last year's annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, it was revealed that Mr. Hemingway had a second and much more obscure home located in a tiny blue cottage facing the ocean. It was in the attic of this cottage that Mr. Hemingway would secretly pen what many believe to be among his most authentic and private stories. These writings include his understated and brilliant sequel "The Younger Man and the Pond", as well as his now widely celebrated Homeric epic which he had tentatively titled "Gertrude Stein Was Quite the Looker."
At a gathering last week at the United States Library of Congress, Hemingway scholars were uniformly certain that a recently discovered half-written manuscript found tucked away inside a pair of leather boxing gloves from the attic of the above mentioned cottage represents Hemingway's first and likely only attempt at a zombie-themed novel. He tentatively named his work "The Dead Sometimes Rise(s)," prompting historians to ponder when the Nobel Laureate first became interested in the zombie trope. It is known that during a visit to Cuba in 1955 he experienced considerable agitation in finding that the movie "Marty," the 1955 Academy Award Winning Best Picture, was not showing, and he therefore resigned himself to watching instead the science fiction masterpiece "Creature with the Atomic Brain." The latter movie featured rotting corpses ingeniously reanimated through atomic neuro-engines installed by a misguided scientist. In a rare written correspondence with his nemesis William Faulkner, Hemingway remarked "only a man who has faced death could stomach a walking corpse." Faulkner wrote back that he agreed with Hemingway and kept his response, astoundingly, to less than 3000 words. Mr. Faulkner's letter has since been lost but there are frantic efforts at the Faulkner archives in Oxford, Mississippi to locate this important piece of history.
The first page of the manuscript follows, with the italicized portions representing Mr. Hemingway's own suggestions for change:
A Zombie Tale, by Ernest Hemingway
There is nothing to being a zombie that anyone does not already know. You need only to bleed, but the blood must matter, must be proper and have purpose. It was must be pure and strong and virile.
It must be the kind of blood that is red, that drops in the sink when the face is cut by an errant razor, sticky like the neck of the proud man who will not allow himself to retreat from the path of the bull. Chainsaws make good tools, like bulls whose horns are true and sharp and reflect the sun as it prepares to rise, and it is a good day when a chainsaw finds a zombie.
It is authentic, and a little bit gross. (perhaps leave out?)
A man one morning is with a woman. He will know he is a man because the woman has told him so, has told him in ways that he understands with his broad shoulders, in ways that make him smile, in earthy hues that must soon yield a nap.
But room service will come because it always does but it will not be the service that he asked for but it might be what e needs. And the knock on the door will be steady and pounding, without ambiguity, a man's knock, and the man will don the terry-cloth robe in a manner that shows his chest hairs and then allow himself a firm grip on a cold doorknob to welcome the food to which he is entitled.
The knock will not be the knock of room service. It is the knock of what once was but is not and cannot be but still is. And his chest hairs will tingle as he senses the moment for the chainsaw while the woman unknowingly waits with her delicate trust for what she thinks will be a nice cup of espresso and perhaps a scone or a doughnut. (note - what kind of doughnut?)
"Why don't you answer the door?" she calls.
And the pounding of steady persistence continues, moving the door with each weighted thump and the man will realize then that she is only a woman and that there will be more women and that in fact he would prefer to date her sister. (sisters?)
A firm well placed grip on the door and a glance through the peephole at the rotting man outside. He made good coffee, but that was before. And now he is here again answering a call for waffles but really he is here to eat the man's nose.
The nose itself is proud and strong and it hangs as if it knows that it matters from the
center of his unshaven face and it is ready if it must to bleed generously when the teeth come.
And the blood will be red, or slightly maroon (chartreuse?), and by then the chainsaw will be an afterthought, to be considered later, on a different morning, in a different time, and with a different woman who understands.
