Dead Connections

The cable guy had been here three hours. Elena sat on her floor watching him work, nursing the same cup of now-cold coffee. She should be at work—another quarterly review, another performance improvement plan—but the cable had been dead since Tuesday, and without television, she'd been forced to sit with her own thoughts.

"You got a zombie setup in here," the technician said, gesturing at the tangle of wires behind her entertainment center. She'd assumed he meant the mess of cables, dusty and forgotten like the rest of her apartment since Mark left.

"Excuse me?"

"Zombie load." He pointed to the orange coaxial cable snaking through the mess. "Your setup's been pulling power even when everything's off. Companies call it vampire draw, but I like zombie. Dead but still eating."

He was younger than she'd first thought—maybe thirty, with kind eyes and a wedding band worn into the tan line on his finger. She wondered if he went home to someone who asked how his day was. If he had someone who noticed when he came home late.

"That's funny," she said, though it wasn't really.. "The cable company said—"

"They always say it's your equipment." He finally found the splitter he'd been looking for. "But look here. Rotten from the inside out. Probably been dying for years."

He replaced it quickly, efficiently. His hands were clean, his movements practiced. He probably did this a dozen times a day, entered people's homes, fixed what was broken, left again.

"All set," he said, packing his tools. "You should be good now."

"Thank you," Elena said, but she was already thinking about what he'd said—dead but still eating. She thought about her marriage, about the performance improvement plan, about the way she'd been moving through her days for months now. Present, breathing, consuming.

After he left, she didn't turn on the television. The orange cable glowed with connection now, live and functioning. But she sat on her floor and watched the dust motes in the afternoon light, and for the first time in a long time, she started to think about what it would take to actually live again.