Dead Man's Serve

The padel court gleamed under floodlights, a pristine rectangle of blue and green where Marcus had been playing out the same ritual for six years. Every Thursday evening with the same three men—partners from the firm, their wives watching from the terrace with wine glasses perpetually half-full. The rubberized surface beneath his sneakers had become as familiar as the numbness spreading through his chest, that peculiar zombie state of moving through motions while something vital had already decayed inside.

His divorce had finalized three months ago. The house sold last week. Marcus still showed up at the club, still played with surgical precision, still laughed at Steven's jokes about quarterly projections and Elena's gossip about whose affair was crumbling fastest. He was forty-three and felt like he'd been buried alive.

"Your form's off, mate," Steven called from across the net, already sweat-slicked and flushed in that way of men who mistook aggression for passion. "You're not following through."

Marcus didn't respond. His attention had snagged on a discarded water bottle near the fence—condensation weeping down its plastic skin, catching light like jewels. Something about the trapped water, the way it waited to be consumed or evaporate, triggered a memory of Sarah. Their last argument had been by the pool at that resort in Tulum. She'd said she was drowning in his ambition, that she couldn't breathe in the rarefied air of his upward trajectory. He'd told her she was being dramatic. She'd packed her bags that night.

The ball came at him—hard, fast, inevitable. Marcus's racquet met it with perfect mechanics, the satisfying *thwack* echoing against the high walls. His opponents scrambled. Point Marcus.

"That's more like it!" Steven shouted, grinning with those too-white teeth that looked increasingly like bones.

Marcus walked to the sideline for his own water bottle. The liquid was warm now, faintly metallic from the plastic. As he drank, he watched his reflection in the club house windows—a ghost in expensive athletic wear, a dead man who kept playing because he'd forgotten how to stop. The water settled in his stomach like lead.

"One more set?" Elena asked from the terrace, already pouring another round of rosé. The sun was setting behind them, painting the sky in bruises of purple and red.

Marcus set down his bottle. The water inside rippled once, then stilled. "Actually," he said, and his voice sounded like someone else's—like the man he might have been if he'd chosen differently, "I think I'm done."

He walked off the court without waiting for their confused reactions. Behind him, the game continued without him. The zombie had finally decided to stop moving.