Even now, she wears the bow, matching pink with her shirt or pants. Her entire wardrobe is rife with varying shades of pink, though the dream died ages ago. Books, once empty pages that are now covered in her handwriting stand one beside another on a shelf above her desk, and she cannot throw them away, no matter that in her heart, she wants to give up.

Somewhere, somehow, some way, his optimism communicated to her, worming deep inside her. Even now, with every piece of evidence to the contrary, she grips the remaining bit of hope fast. He is married, a good marriage, one that makes him happy in a way that she thinks perhaps she never quite knew how to do.

But she is forever his, even so.

A few months ago, my husband was fired. We could see it coming, honestly, and it wasn't that he was dropping the ball in anything except brown-nosing, to be frank. The place he was working at didn't pay attention to sanitation, and he'd stopped his boss from serving sour food on more than one occasion. The menu he was working with (as he is a chef) was poorly thought out, and he did what he could, back in the beginning, to ensure that he was bringing in new customers and ensuring repeat business, but it all went rather drastically downhill fast enough that by the time he was fired, he'd already started looking for another job. His reasoning? "Even if they don't fire me, I want OUT."

He'd interviewed, and supposedly been accepted, months before at a nice little pub near our apartment, but the boss there kept stringing him along. That boss would call my husband up to come do some training, and yet never actually give my husband a firm start date so that he could give his two weeks' notice. And this went on for months.

In the end, before he could even start there, he found out that his contact in the place, a man who'd first told him about the position, had been fired for confronting his boss about a small pay scandal - the pay scandal being that he wasn't getting paid for all of the hours he was working. Once I'd heard that, the "nice little pub" didn't seem like a very promising place to me, but it was up to my husband, and so far, it was the best lead he had on a job.

Eventually, we were scraping by. My husbands' hours had been cut so drastically that it was all we could do to pay our bills, more or less. And right around that time, he had a good lead on a potential job - one that would advance his career, get him closer to what he originally trained to do, and pay... if not better, then at least better hours. It might possibly even be salary, which, given that he might be working fifty and sixty hours a week, isn't exactly a dream come true. But at the same time, salary would've given us a certain measure of security. We could've budgeted much better than we had been.

And then the actual firing happened - according to the paper, among other things, he was fired for being more creative than his boss. We laughed about it, but there was a definite edge of panic to our laughter. His livelihood had suffered in the economy downswing enough that over the last couple of years, he'd been laid off on at least two other occasions, and while we have dear friends who are blessed angels willing to aid us if necessary... we're trying so very hard to make it on our own.

My husband stepped up the job interviews, and we scrambled to search out contacts we did have. That "nice little pub" was back to looking fairly promising, and he'd actually told them that he was giving the really good-looking job another couple of days before he gave up on them. The day after he'd talked to the boss at the "nice little pub" about his situation, the good job called... They wanted him in, and were delighted when he could start work immediately.

With only a week of worry and heartache under our belts, my husband had a new job, vastly superior to the one that had cast him aside, and which has continued to make him happy to this day.

Thank goodness he got fired!

The short answer is, I'll die, likely to be reincarnated for however short a time as one of the brain-sucking legion of undead slowly taking over the world. And I do mean slowly. Because let's face it... zombies are not the epitome of health. While they are surprisingly strong, and have escaped at least one of the major handicaps that hold back most mortals I know - the handicap being the fact that we feel pain, and it can incapacitate us - they are not well-known for breaking the world record on the 300-yard dash.

However, this knowledge does not comfort me much. Truth to tell, I'm something of a computer potato. I don't exercise nearly as much as I should, and as a result, like the zombies, I'm not known for breaking the 300-yard dash world record. Unless, of course, it's the record for longest time spent running the 300-yard dash. I might actually have a shot at that one.

Added to my sadly out-of-shape physique is the fact that I have little in the way of weapons' skills or handy-dandy quirky knowledge which might encourage a resistance group into protecting me. I don't think that being able to sell out-of-date luggage is a skill needed to survive a zombie-infested world. And while I also make, I believe, a decent mother, that's not precisely an exclusive field... even if it sometimes feels like it might be.

So in the end, after weighing my chances (and avoiding that little square white thing that tells me I'm entirely too heavy!), I definitely have to assume that when the zombies come, I should slather my head with barbeque sauce and start working on an up-and-coming morphine addiction for the pain. Because in the end, it will be my brains nourishing the undead.