Dead Ringer

The cat appeared at precisely 3:47 AM, materializing from the alley shadows like it had been waiting for me all along. I was three gin deep and sitting on my fire escape, scrolling through my iphone with that peculiar desperation of the profoundly lonely—swiping past faces I'd touched, bodies I'd held, lives I'd ruined.

"You look like shit," the cat seemed to say, its yellow eyes unimpressed.

"You have no idea," I told it.

I was twelve days into my thirtieth year and already a zombie—not the brain-eating kind, but the worse sort: the walking dead who shower daily and show up to work and make small talk about weather. My soul had been hollowed out years ago by the slow erosion of disappointment, by marriages that dissolved like sugar in hot tea, by ambitions that withered on the vine. I was bearing the weight of every unfulfilled promise I'd ever made to myself.

The cat jumped onto the railing, graceful and unconcerned. It had a mangled left ear and a scar running down its nose. A survivor.

"You know what the difference is between us?" I asked it. "You don't have to pretend you're not alone."

My iphone buzzed—Sarah, asking if I wanted to come over. Sarah, who smelled like vanilla and always left her hair ties on my nightstand. Sarah, who was married to someone else. We'd been conducting our affair in stolen hours and hotel rooms for six months, and somehow I'd convinced myself it wasn't destroying me.

The cat watched me consider the text, then turned and walked away without a backward glance.

"That's what I thought," I said to the empty air.

I deleted Sarah's message. Then I deleted the other four messages from her that I hadn't answered. Then I blocked her number. It wasn't noble or brave or even particularly smart, but as the first light of morning began to bleed into the sky, I realized something: zombies don't choose. They just hunger and feed and hunger again. I had made a choice.

The cat was gone, but somewhere in the distance, I could hear the city waking up—car engines, distant sirens, the collective groan of millions of people bearing the weight of their own quiet catastrophes. For the first time in years, I didn't feel quite so dead among them.