Some Zombie Stories, 10 The zombies were doing their spring cleaning. If you whistled past the graveyard you could see them churning the dirt in their graves and polishing the headstones. Here and there they were bringing fresly wilted flowers or dead sprigs of thistle to each other, replacing the more aged of the mementos they had on their graves. It was a common misperception among outsiders, believing that the zombies were people who had been related to us and then died and then kind of half-lived. The zombies were not our relatives, shambling around town in the clothes we'd buried them in, or dropping bits of bone and flesh that were genetically related to us. No, nobody who actually lived in the town ever became a zombie. We didn't know how they had started and it wasn't even clear when they had first arrived in town. We didn't know if they reproduced or were spontaneously generated or anything much about them. They just lived their lives and we lived ours and that was it.