Dead Season

The fluorescent lights hummed their eternal note, the same frequency that had been drilling into Marcus's skull for seven years. He sat in his cubicle, a zombie in a button-down, mechanically processing claims he no longer read. The company mascot—a stylized sphinx with corporate smile—peered down from posters on every floor. KNOWLEDGE IS OUR BUSINESS, it proclaimed. Marcus snorted into his lukewarm coffee. The only thing he knew was that the sphinx's riddle had been solved long ago: the answer was existential dread, and nobody cared.

His phone buzzed. Sarah.

"Baseball tonight?" she'd texted. "Jake's pitching."

Marcus's thumb hovered over the screen. Jake was their son, seventeen and brilliant, headed for university on a scholarship Marcus had spent two decades helping him earn. But Marcus hadn't seen a game in three years. Hadn't seen much of anything, really. He'd become the man who streamed through the fiber cable, eyes fixed on glowing rectangles while his family lived actual lives in rooms he rarely entered.

"Can't," he typed. "Late meeting."

The lie tasted like ash.

His boss, Chen, appeared in his doorway. Chen asked more questions than Marcus answered—riddles about optimization, synergies, bandwidth. A corporate sphinx demanding solutions to problems that shouldn't exist. Marcus solved them anyway, because that's what zombies did.

"You look tired, Marcus," Chen said.

"I'm fine."

"Sarah called yesterday. Asked if we could send you home earlier. She sounded..." Chen hesitated. "Like she meant it."

The cable box at home waited with its blue glow. His son's childhood baseball collection gathered dust on shelves Marcus couldn't remember touching. The sphinx asked its riddles from every wall, every screen, every performance review.

Marcus stood up. His chair scraped against the floor, louder than he expected.

"Marcus?"

"I need to go."

"It's 3 PM."

"I know." Marcus grabbed his jacket. "My kid's pitching. I've never actually seen him pitch. Not really. Not when I was there."

Chen's expression shifted—something like understanding, or perhaps surrender. "The sphinx can wait."

Marcus walked out of the building and didn't look back at the corporate posters, the riddles, the endless fluorescent hum. He hailed a taxi and gave an address he hadn't visited in daylight for years.

The baseball diamond appeared through the taxi window like sudden grace. His son stood on the mound, lifting his leg in the windup, and Marcus realized with a jolt that he'd never seen this live—the ritual, the focus, the unmistakable grace of Jake's motion. The ball left his hand and Marcus held his breath. Strike three.

Sarah found him behind the backstop, crying without shame.

"You came," she said.

"I'm done being a zombie," he replied, and for the first time in seven years, he believed it.

The sphinx's riddle had finally been solved: live before you die, even when it costs you everything you thought you needed.