Exquisite Corpse with Ann James, Grandma Smillew and Matthew Clapham

My Zombie Mom Has a Fusion Reactor in Her Brain

There’s not much time left

Ann James
The Pub
Published in
3 min readNov 27, 2023

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Photo by Dynamic Wang on Unsplash

The first thing I saw was the horse’s head. A Mustang. He’s at the shore of Pyramid Lake. No one knows how deep the lake is. There are stories of people who drowned at Lake Tahoe in the Sierras, and their bodies have been found in Pyramid 70 miles away.

Some one on a team of divers once ascended from the depths of Pyramid to say, “You don’t want to know what’s down there.”

You bet I don’t. Pretty sure I’m going to find my mother’s zombified body again. Anytime I open a weird door somewhere, she shows up. I was on the moon once, and when I opened the door to go outside, guess who was there?!

It’s pretty wild. It’s not the most useless thing, though.

When mom showed up behind the third door at Let’s Make a Deal, we became famous. There’s still a meme circulating on the Internet eighty years later. And I even get some royalties from it! That’s what I do for a living now. If I need money, I sue a few of these punks who share content to which they don’t have the right to.

Teach them a lesson.

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Ann James
The Pub
Writer for

Her writing muse lurks in the volcanic hills amidst mustangs, marmots and jackalopes. While hiking with her dogs, Ann stumbles upon stories of dark humor.