Against the Dying Light

The fluorescent lights of the office hummed with that particular frequency that made you feel like a zombie before 9 AM. Elena stared at her spreadsheet, her fingers moving automatically, while somewhere in the distance, a radio broadcast a baseball game—bottom of the ninth, two outs, the announcer's voice rising with that familiar crescendo of possibility.

She remembered when she cared about baseball. When she cared about anything, really.

"You going to eat that?" asked Marcus from the next cubicle, pointing at the orange on her desk.

Elena blinked. "It's been there since Tuesday."

"Still counts as lunch," he said, already halfway through his own sad attempt at nutrition—wilted spinach from a plastic container, darkening at the edges like their collective will to live.

They'd had something, once. A papaya-colored sunset in Hawaii, her company's conference last November. Two margaritas in, Marcus had rested his hand on hers at the luau, and for three days, they'd pretended the real world didn't exist. Then they'd returned to their respective mortgages, their separate apartments, this fluorescent purgatory where the unsaid things accumulated like dust.

"Game's almost over," Marcus said now, nodding toward the radio. "Someone's about to win or lose everything."

"Everyone loses eventually," Elena replied, peeling the orange. The spray of citrus hit the air, sharp and bright and temporary.

Marcus laughed, but it was tired, practiced. "God, we're depressing."

"Realistic."

"Same thing at our age."

He'd turned forty last month. She was thirty-eight. They measured life in disappointments now—in promotions that never came, in marriages that dissolved quietly, in the slow recognition that nobody actually figures it out. They were all just zombies, really. Moving through the motions, pretending the fluorescent lights were the sun.

The radio crackled. The crowd roared. Someone had hit a home run. The game was decided in a single swing, as if anything could really be that simple.

"Want to get dinner?" Marcus asked, not looking at her. "Actual restaurant. No desk food."

Elena considered her spinach, her dusty orange, the spreadsheet that would still be here tomorrow. "Pick me up at seven."

She didn't say: I still think about Hawaii. I still think about your hand on mine. She didn't have to. Some things, you carried like the taste of citrus on your fingers—lingering, bittersweet, and impossible to wash away.