Corporate Necromancy

The zombie state had crept up on Maya gradually. Three years of corporate marketing, and she'd stopped noticing the gray pallor of her skin in mirrors, the way her movements became jerky and mechanical, like stop-motion animation of herself.

She stood at her kitchen counter at 6 AM, her palm pressed flat against the cold granite while she arranged her morning pharmacopeia: Vitamin D3 for the apartment living, B-complex for energy, magnesium for the anxiety that whispered she'd never escape. Her hair—what used to be thick and dark—now fell in brittle clumps each time she washed it. The shower drain clogged with evidence of her slow decay.

"You look like shit," Elena had told her two nights ago at the bar. They'd been friends since college, back when they both believed they'd be artists by thirty. Now Elena was a corporate lawyer who drank herself to sleep four nights a week, and Maya was whatever she was becoming.

"It's the project," Maya had said. "Launch next week."

"It's always a project," Elena said, ordering another round. "You know what my priest told me? He said the devil keeps us busy with things that don't matter so we forget to ask the questions that do."

Maya had laughed. She didn't believe in the devil anymore than she believed in God, but she believed in launch dates and quarterly targets and the way her heart sometimes skipped beats when she opened her email.

The irony hit her later that night: she swallowed vitamins to stay alive while living like the undead. She spent her days convincing consumers they needed products they didn't want, and her nights trying to convince herself she wasn't already dead. The zombie metaphor wasn't about eating brains—it was about having already lost yours.

Elena called her at 2:33 AM, drunk. "I quit my job," she said. "I'm moving to Costa Rica. There are palm trees there, Maya. Real ones. Not the stock photos we use in campaign decks."

"You can't just—"

"Watch me."

Maya stood at her kitchen counter in the gray predawn light, her palm still pressed against the granite, and counted the vitamins she'd need today to maintain the appearance of life. Elena would be on a beach by next week. Maya would be here, becoming something that moved and spoke and produced but no longer knew why it bothered.