Dead Inside the Open Plan

The fedora was a mistake, Maya realized, catching her reflection in the darkened lobby glass. At 9 AM on a Tuesday, it screamed midlife crisis more than personal renaissance. She'd bought it yesterday, standing in the accessories department of Bloomingdale's while her divorce lawyer left yet another voicemail about the settlement.

The elevator doors opened onto the thirty-seventh floor, and she stepped into the sea of cubicles. This was the open plan, the collaborative workspace, the place where creativity supposedly flourished. Instead, it was where the undead roamed—her colleagues, those corporate **zombies** who'd sold their souls for stock options and standing desks. They moved through their days with hollow eyes, clutching coffee cups like lifelines, speaking in buzzwords and quarterly projections.

'Maya!' Greg from accounting materialized beside her desk. 'Great hat. Very bold.'

'Thanks,' she said, though his smile didn't reach his eyes. No one's did anymore.

Her **iPhone** buzzed—David, her ex, wanting to know if she'd picked up his tennis racket from the apartment. She stared at the notification, the familiar weight settling in her chest. Three years of marriage reduced to coordinate pickup times for sporting equipment. She'd stopped answering these texts two weeks ago. Some boundaries, unlike her marriage, were worth maintaining.

Lunch was a sad affair from the cafeteria: wilted **spinach** salad with grilled chicken that tasted like despair. She ate alone in the breakroom, watching three junior analysts laugh at something on their phones. They reminded her of herself at twenty-five—before the promotions, before the marriage, before she'd learned that adult life was mostly just holding yourself together in increasingly complicated ways.

'What's on your neck?' Greg asked, suddenly appearing beside her again.

Maya's hand flew to her throat. 'What?'

'Your collar. You've got—' He gestured vaguely. 'Green stuff. Spinach?'

The humiliation was immediate and total. She hurried to the restroom, scrubbing at the stain in the mirror while her eyes filled with tears. The fedora suddenly looked ridiculous, not bold. The lipstick was smudged. The woman staring back was thirty-four, single, and eating lunch alone in a corporate bathroom.

But then she caught her own gaze and stopped crying. Something shifted—some small, stubborn thing inside her that refused to die completely. She washed her face, fixed her collar, adjusted the hat with more care than before.

Let them stare. Let them see the spinach in her teeth and the cracks in her armor. She was alive, after all. More alive than any of them, sitting in their cubicles like characters in a dystopian novel they didn't realize they were living.

Maya walked back to her desk, head high, ready to face the afternoon. The zombie apocalypse had already come and gone, and somehow, impossibly, she was still standing.