Dead Signals

The baseball card sat on Mara's nightstand, its corners soft from handling. Her father had given it to her the summer before everything fell apart—a rookie card, pristine then, now bearing the thumbprints of a thousand restless nights. She traced the player's face while Jesse slept beside her, his breathing the only sound in the apartment besides the low hum of the cable box, that blue-eye blinking in the darkness like some insomniac sentinel.

Mara should have been sleeping. Tomorrow was Monday, which meant the subway commute, the fluorescent office where she moved spreadsheets like grave dirt, the feeling of being a zombie in sensible heels. She'd caught her own reflection in the bathroom mirror that evening—hollow eyes, skin the color of old milk—and barely recognized the woman staring back.

She got up, padded barefoot to the kitchen. The baseball card made the journey with her, tucked into her palm like a talisman. On the fridge, held by a magnet shaped like a bull, was the photograph from Coney Island. She and Jesse, two years ago, wind-whipped and grinning, cotton candy stains on their shirts like wounded sunsets. That Mara seemed like a different species—someone who believed in ordinary happiness.

The hat hung on the coat rack by the door—Jesse's grandfather fedora, worn leather smelling of tobacco and time. He'd started wearing it to parties, some affectation about being a man of substance, but mostly he just looked like a kid playing dress-up in a dead man's clothes.

She considered her phone on the counter. The text from her supervisor was still there, glowing softly in the dark: "We need to discuss your trajectory." Corporate language for giving up. But giving up on what? The job that made her feel like her soul was being slowly harvested? The relationship where she and Jesse circled each other like polite strangers, both too cowardly to say what they'd known for months?

Outside, a car alarm sliced through the silence. Mara pressed the baseball card to her chest, felt its sharp corners bite into her skin. Her father's voice in memory: "You don't get to call balls and strikes from the dugout, kid. You have to step into the box."

She looked at the bull magnet holding up the ghost of who they used to be. Then at the hat that had become a symbol of everything performable about their life together. The cable box pulsed its blind blue rhythm, keeping time with a life she no longer recognized.

Mara dropped the baseball card into the trash can beneath the sink. Something loosened in her chest—not hope exactly, but something like it. The beginning of something, or the end. She wasn't sure yet. But she wasn't a zombie anymore. She was just waking up.