Dead Battery by the Deep End

The plastic lounge chair stuck to the back of Maya's thighs, leaving red welts she'd find later in the mirror. She didn't care. The apartment complex pool was empty at 2 PM on a Tuesday—the undead hours when regular people worked, and people like her floated in the space between employment and whatever came next.

Her iPhone lay face-up on the concrete, screen cracked like a spiderweb from when she'd thrown it across the room three days ago. That was after the Zoom call where Gary—her former boss, her former everything—had told her the company was "pivoting" and her position was "redundant." She'd thrown the phone so hard that the battery had died instantly, or maybe it was already dying, like their relationship, like her savings.

Now the screen flickered with 4% battery life. An email notification slid into view: *LinkedIn — You have 147 pending connection requests.*

Maya laughed, a dry cracked sound. The zombie recruiters were already circling. They smelled blood in the water. They'd feed on her desperation, offer her "amazing opportunities" at companies with names like SynergyX and CorpCorp, places where she'd shuffle through fluorescent-lit halls with hundreds of other corporate undead, brains eaten by meetings that should have been emails, souls hollowed out by quarterly goals and team-building exercises.

She'd become one of them. A zombie with a 401k.

Her phone buzzed. Gary.

She stared at his name glowing against the cracked glass. Part of her—some soft, foolish part that still remembered him whispering *I love you* in this very pool two months ago, when they'd skinny-dipped at midnight and he'd told her he'd never let her go—that part wanted to answer.

The smarter part, the part that had noticed him slowly pulling away since before the layoff, knew better.

The phone buzzed again. A voicemail.

With trembling fingers, Maya typed her passcode—his birthday, god she was pathetic—and pressed the phone to her ear.

"Maya." His voice sounded tired. Thin. "I've been thinking about you. I know things are hard right now, but I wanted to tell you—there's something I should have said earlier. About us. About why this happened."

A pause. Maya held her breath.

"I didn't fight for you when they made the cuts," he said. "I should have. I'm so sorry."

The voicemail ended. Maya lowered the phone. The battery icon flashed red—1%. The screen went dark.

For a long time, she sat there as the afternoon light moved across the water. Then she stood up, walked to the pool's edge, and dropped the phone into the deep end. It sank without a splash, joining all the other things people had lost in these waters.

Somewhere inside her, something began to wake up.