Dead Men Walking

The fluorescent lights hummed their eternal, headache-inducing song as Marcus sat at his desk, feeling like the office zombie he'd become—shuffling between meetings, eyes glazed over, communicating in corporate buzzwords that meant nothing. He'd caught his own reflection in the bathroom mirror that morning: dark circles, skin the color of old paste, a man thirty years going on eighty.

His phone buzzed. Sarah. Again.

"Can we talk?" her texts had been saying for three days.

Marcus stared at his lunch—wilted spinach salad that looked as defeated as he felt. He'd ordered it because the doctor had warned about his cholesterol, because he was forty-two now and mortality was starting to feel less like an abstract concept and more like a collections agency knocking at the door. The spinach stuck in his teeth as he chewed, and he wondered if this was what his life had become: waiting for heart attacks while avoiding difficult conversations.

"Remember when we used to play baseball?" she'd asked him last week, out of nowhere. They'd met in a co-ed league twelve years ago. She played second base; he'd been terrible at outfield but loved the way she'd laugh at his fumbles, the orange sunset behind her as she teased him about catching like a drunk giraffe.

That orange sunset—god, he remembered it. The way everything had seemed possible then.

Marcus pushed the spinach around his plate. He wasn't hungry anymore. The office around him was full of people pretending to work, everyone marching toward their graves with the dignity of well-dressed corpses. His phone lit up again.

"I'm at our field. Just one more inning?"

He stood up. His chair made a sad little wheeze as it rolled back.

"Where are you going?" his boss asked, appearing like a specter in the doorway. "We have that presentation—"

"Family emergency," Marcus said, and for once, it wasn't a lie. His family was dissolving. His life was dissolving. He was already dead—he just hadn't laid down yet.

The sun was still orange when he found her sitting on the bleachers, glove in hand, waiting like she had all those years ago. She didn't look like a zombie. She looked alive, she looked like the person he'd almost become, and suddenly he knew—some games go into extra innings, but you can't win if you never step up to the plate.

"Your form's garbage," she said without looking at him, and he sat down, and for the first time in three years, he didn't feel dead at all.