Dead Reckoning

I'd been a zombie for three years. Wake, commute, stare at spreadsheets, sleep, repeat. My marriage had died quietly, neither of us bothering to hold a funeral. We just kept going through motions, like couples do when they're too comfortable to leave and too cowardly to try again.

The office padel court had been my wife's idea — something we could do together that wasn't dinner or television. Thursday evenings, we'd rally back and forth, the ball bouncing between us like a conversation we'd forgotten how to have. She'd stopped asking if I was happy somewhere around year two.

It happened at the company holiday party. Someone brought in a palm reader — edgy entertainment for bored professionals. I went along with it because that's you do when you're dead inside.

She traced the lines on my palm and frowned.

"You're still alive," she said, like it was an accusation.

Her finger pressed into my heart line. "But someone close to you isn't. Hasn't been for a long time."

I pulled my hand away. That night, I told my wife I wanted a divorce.

She didn't cry. She didn't yell. She just said, "I know. I've been waiting for you to notice."

I ended up at the beach house my brother had left me when he died — the only honest death in our family. The ocean was swimming with bioluminescent algae, each movement leaving trails of ghostly blue fire. I stripped down and walked into the water.

The cold hit me like a slap. I dove under, letting the salt burn my eyes, my lungs screaming for air. When I surfaced, gasping, my palm rested against the moonlit water, and for the first time in three years, I felt something like hope.

The zombie had drowned. Something else was swimming to the surface.

I didn't know its name yet. But I knew, suddenly and terribly, that I wanted to live long enough to find out.