Interview with the Last Zombie in America

Or, A Treatise on the Palatability of Pain

Acting as an investigative journalist for The Times, a Peabody Award–winning writer set out to interview the last known American descendant of the White Lion—the privateer ship that once traded African men and women to English colonists in Virginia in exchange for food. Many had presumed the bloodline erased through systematic means: not through slaughter, but by way of collaborative transmutation. Their DNA was quietly undone. The resultant beings, once human, became hollowed out—self-hating, demonized husks the world would come to call zombies.

One by one, they vanished, self-immolating into mounds of ash—black, bitter, anonymous—discarded on the shores of Papenoo, Stokksnes, and Karekare.

But one remained.

He found the writer. Invited him in.

Little was made of the invitation’s authenticity—or of the zombie’s. But the writer had a feeling. A hunch that this was the story that would secure his long-coveted Pulitzer. And so, he went.

What follows is the result: