Marcel Winatschek

Zombie Toothpicks

I picked up these zombie toothpicks somewhere—little picks shaped like the undead crawling out of your food. Eight euros or so, though I’ve long since stopped tracking what I paid for them. They live in a drawer with the other party supplies, next to things I bought five years ago and never used.

There’s something good about objects this pointless. A designer worked out the proportions, how the zombie figure would sit on a pick, how it catches light on a cheese board. That kind of attention to something completely frivolous feels honest.

The zombie apocalypse is background radiation for contemporary culture now. We’re all half-joking about collapse constantly. Every party is a small performance of ’yeah, I think about it too.’ These toothpicks are one tiny way of participating in that.

I don’t actually use them much. Most of the time they’re just sitting in that drawer, forgotten until I’m setting up for something and remember they exist. But pulling them out is always a small satisfaction, in the way that dumb, self-aware objects can be—they don’t apologize for being exactly what they are.