Dead Channels

The cable guy came at 4 PM on a Tuesday, the same time Marcus used to take our dog Buster to the park. I watched from the window as the technician disconnected us from the world, coil by coil, like a life support system being withdrawn.

That was the day David finally left, though he'd been gone for months before that. Not gone physically—he still sat on our beige sofa, still ate the dinners I cooked, still muttered responses to my questions. But somewhere inside, he'd become one of them. The walking dead. A zombie of the person I married, hollowed out by forty-hour weeks and mortgages and the slow erosion of dreams we stopped sharing somewhere around year seven.

I found his old baseball glove in the donation box that morning. We'd met on a softball field, both of us drunk on cheap beer and the electric possibility of new love. He'd pitched a no-hitter that game. I'd cheered myself hoarse. Now the leather was cracked, unused since before the pandemic, before the world ended and forgot to tell us it was over.

The sunset that evening burned orange and violent across the sky, the kind of apocalyptic beauty that makes you feel insignificant and infinite all at once. I stood on the porch and watched it alone, Buster's leash still hanging by the door where it had waited for three years since the cancer took him.

David's car pulled into the driveway. He got out, not looking at the sunset, not looking at me where I leaned against the peeling paint. He just walked past, shoulders slumped forward, carrying himself like someone carrying an invisible weight only he could feel.

"Cable's out," I said.

He nodded, eyes on his shoes. "Probably for the best."

Inside, the house was quiet without the television's constant hum. No news. No sports. No background noise to fill the silence between two people who had forgotten how to speak to each other.

I handed him the baseball glove. He held it like a relic from another life, another version of himself that still believed in things like hope and second chances. For a moment, something flickered behind his eyes—not life exactly, but the ghost of it.

"Remember," I said softly. "You threw a no-hitter."

He looked at me then, really looked at me, for the first time in years. "I think," he said, "I think I forgot who I was supposed to be."

The orange light faded to gray. The cable guy had finished his work. We stood in our living room, two survivors of something we still couldn't name, surrounded by the debris of a life we'd built together and then abandoned without ever leaving.

"We could play catch," I offered. "Tomorrow. In the park."

He didn't say yes. But he didn't say no either. And for the first time in forever, that felt like something like hope.