We’d stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You’d think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn’t.

Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

And, for one– ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadn’t before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead.