He’d learned what lessons he could and his success was manifest as the zombies he was trying to organize spent most of their time vomiting in their seats in the auditorium. You’re dreaming again she heard him say, I didn’t actually just do that it was just a dream. But he’d known better. And he wasted no time by first testing his reality with candy corn and plums. Day after day and night after night he’d felt that his days were coming two at a time and his nights in threes. We’ve been promised new knobs and I want to know when we’re getting them an angry older tenant inquired from the back as loud as she could but only half loud enough to rise above the din of zombie ministrations. A portly fellow cum zombie turned as she spoke and ran for her with an alacrity he likely never knew in his alive life but was quickly turned away by auxiliary police who’d been contracted for just such services and who by all available criteria had performed it well even as some of the tenants had suggested that they were in league with the zombies. The local magistrate continued his speech by noting that he had been in touch with the very highest echelons of some local agencies and he could assure them that progress was a-coming. With patience, he admonished us, mountains can crumble and the towering incompetency and cronyism that had run the city long enough would be on its way out with just such inaction on the part of those in attendance. His thoughts drifted back to the race he watched earlier in the day. As the fleet-footed participants passed it was strange custom to offer the athletes presents. Almost invariably the runners would refuse prompting the offeror of the gift to keep it. Thus the gifts had become more wrapped items sought by the would-be benefactor for their own sake. And so it was that when an athlete did accept the gift it would often times be kitchen implements or brassieres. And before long the custom had become to hurl undergarments and rolling pins at the passing crowd because it is often those traditions for which there can simply be no explanation that stand the rigors of time while those which seem to be informed by principles of middling measure fall off. Such were his thoughts anyway when the zombie running for him was felled after being pelted with a frying pan by a tenant whose plea for functional salad crisper drawers for all refrigerators had hardly skipped a beat.