Dead Man Walking

The first thing I noticed was the taste of copper in my mouth, like I'd been sucking on pennies. Then my left hand went numb.

I sat at my desk, quarterly reports due in twenty minutes, and watched my fingers curl into a claw against my will. Outside, lightning shattered the sky — a dramatic backdrop for what I assumed was a stroke at thirty-four.

"You look like a zombie," my coworker Sarah had joked earlier. We'd been discussing our department's latest restructuring wave. Fifth round in two years. We were all the walking dead by then, trading our lives for health insurance and a 401(k) that wouldn't survive the climate collapse anyway.

I stared at my computer screen. Baseball scores scrolled across a ticker I couldn't remember opening. My grandfather had taken me to games as a kid. The crack of the bat, vendors shouting, the collective roar of the crowd. When had I last felt alive like that? College? Before?

My palm felt foreign against the desk, notmine but something attached to my wrist, moving according to its own alien agenda. I remembered reading about neurological conditions where patients lose ownership of their limbs. Alien hand syndrome. But this was different — this was my whole life that felt alien.

Another lightning flash illuminated my reflection in the window. Hollow eyes, skin that had forgotten sunlight. A creature shambling through the motions of living, consuming resources, producing spreadsheets, contributing nothing that would survive a year.

"You okay?" Sarah asked from the doorway.

I opened my mouth, but the words dissolved before they could form. What was okay? What had ever been okay about this?

"Just tired," I finally managed, a zombie's answer.

I should have gone to the hospital. Instead I opened the next quarterly report. Some things, you realize, don't need saving.