Dead Leaves Gathering

Elena had become a zombie somewhere around her seventh quarterly review. Not the flesh-eating kind—the corporate variety, moving through meetings with glassy eyes, typing emails that felt like strangers' words.

"You should try this spinach salad," Marcus said, pushing a plastic container across the conference table. "It's supposed to help with energy."

She picked at the greens. "Marcus, I'm thirty-four. I don't need energy. I need an exorcism."

He laughed, but she wasn't joking. Three years of optimizing workflows, delivering synergies, and being told she was "operating at zombie capacity" by a manager who'd once accidentally CC'd the whole company on his resignation draft.

The real breakdown came during the bear market presentation. Some analyst in a suit too expensive for the room was explaining how their department needed to "bear down" and "hibernate" until Q3. Elena watched a single orange leaf flutter past the window—autumn arriving like an apology.

"Are you okay?" Marcus asked afterward.

"I keep thinking about that spinach," she said. "How it starts so vibrant and just... wilts. That's us, Marcus. We're wilting in this conference room."

"That's dark, El."

"I'm serious. My mother called yesterday. She asked if I was still painting, and I told her I'd been too busy. I haven't picked up a brush in four years. I've become a zombie who can't even create art about being dead inside."

That weekend, she drove to her mother's house. Found her old paints. The canvas stayed blank for hours until she mixed orange—not sunset orange, but the corrosive bright of traffic work lights. Then she added the gray of conference room carpets, the limp green of wilting spinach, the heavy brown of bearing burdens too long.

"It's ugly," her mother said, standing behind her.

"It's honest."

"Zombies can't make art, Elena. They just consume."

Elena looked at the painting—a rotting garden in corporate colors, somehow beautiful in its decay. "Then maybe I'm finally alive."

Monday morning, she drafted her resignation. Two paragraphs, no corporate jargon, ending with: I'd rather wilt on my own terms than rot in this room. The spinach plant on her desk had died months ago. She left it there—a tiny corpse, a warning, a reminder.

Sometimes resurrection looks like giving up.