Dead Man's Laps

The pool at the YMCA was always empty at 10 PM, which was exactly how Marcus liked it. At 34, he'd become something of a zombie himself—shuffling through corporate strategy meetings by day, his email inbox a graveyard of unread requests, his soul slowly decomposing under fluorescent lights. His therapist called it burnout. Marcus called it Tuesday.

He swam laps now, the chlorine stinging his eyes, his body cutting through water that felt like baptism and drowning all at once. This was the only hour he felt anything anymore. The silence was holy. No Slack notifications. No expectations. Just the rhythm of his own breath and the ache in his shoulders, proof that he was still, somehow, alive.

That night, there was spinach stuck to the bottom of lane three. A single leaf, swirling in the current like a lost continent. Marcus floated there, treading water, staring at it until his eyes burned. Something about that spinach broke him—maybe it was that someone had been eating something green and hopeful near this place of purification, or maybe it was just that he'd forgotten to eat dinner again, his body surviving on caffeine and resentment.

He thought of Elena, leaving him six months ago because she couldn't love someone who wasn't there. "You're not even present," she'd said, and she was right. He'd been a zombie long before the job market collapsed, long before the divorce, swimming through years without feeling the water against his skin.

Marcus climbed out of the pool, his body heavy and hollow. He thought about becoming someone who ate vegetables. Someone who called his mother. Someone who felt things. He gathered his things, dripping onto the concrete, and decided that tomorrow—tomorrow he would be alive. But as he walked to his car, he caught his own reflection in the glass doors: eyes empty, mouth slack, moving forward because that's what bodies did. The zombie staggered toward his vehicle, and somewhere behind him, that leaf of spinach kept swimming, caught in the filter's endless mechanical prayer.