Dead Drift

The office had turned Elena into something resembling a zombie — not the brain-hungry kind, but the modern corporate variety: numb, repetitive, hollowed out by three years of budget cuts and 'synergy' meetings. She moved through her days on autopilot, her genuine responses buried under layers of polite facades.

Her secret rebellion was swimming. Every Tuesday and Thursday night, she drove twenty minutes to a rec center that smelled faintly of chlorine and adolescent angst. There, suspended in the lukewarm water, she could finally exhale. The rhythmic stroke, breathe, stroke, breathe became a kind of liturgy.

It was there she saw Marcus — senior management, the kind of man who signed dismissal notices without looking up from his phone. But at 10 PM, he floated on his back, eyes closed, something broken radiating from him. His Golden Retriever, a therapy dog named Baxter, waited poolside, head resting on massive paws.

"He's not supposed to be on the deck," Elena said one night, shivering in her towel.

Marcus cracked one eye open. "He's better company than most people here."

"Fair point."

"My wife left," Marcus said suddenly, as if the water had loosened his tongue. "Took the kids. Baxter's the only one who stayed."

Elena thought of her own marriage — hollowed out like her, both of them too tired to leave, too coward to stay. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I'm more zombie than human these days anyway." He sank beneath the surface.

Elena watched his suspended form, the way the water held him like something precious and breakable. She thought about reaching out, about suggesting they grab a drink, about acknowledging the particular loneliness of being undead together in a city that never slept.

Instead, she slipped into the lane beside him, and they swam in parallel silence, two zombies dog-paddling through the deep end, pretending the water could wash them clean.