Dead Signals

Maya sat at the kitchen table, her iPhone screen glowing in the darkness of her apartment at 3 AM. The baseball game from twenty years ago played on silent repeat—her father's voice narrating every pitch, every swing, every moment they'd shared on that old couch in the house she'd sold last month.

The bull of a man who'd raised her was gone now. Six months dead, and still she checked his phone line like a grieving addict looking for one last hit of digital afterlife. The account had been suspended weeks ago, but she kept paying the bill. Some part of her believed that if she maintained the connection, he might somehow reach through.

Her cat, Buster, jumped onto the table and pawed at her hand. The only living thing left in her orbit, and even he seemed disappointed in her.

"I know," she whispered to him. "I'm like a zombie. Just going through motions."

She'd said it to her therapist last week: "I feel dead inside. Just walking around, doing the job, seeing friends, but nothing matters." The therapist had nodded and written something in her notebook, prescribed another medication that Maya hadn't filled.

Her phone chimed—a wrong number. "Sorry, have the wrong person." Maya stared at it. Then it hit her: her father's old number had been recycled. Someone else had it now. A stranger.

She felt sick. The connection was finally, truly severed.

But then another thought: maybe that was okay. Maybe she'd been haunting herself, clinging to a ghost when she should've been learning to live again. Maybe being a zombie wasn't about being undead—it was about being stuck between life and death, unwilling to cross fully into either.

Buster purred against her arm. Maya scratched behind his ears and thought about the sunrise coming. She deleted her father's contact from her favorites, then stood up and walked to the window.

Tomorrow, she'd call the therapist and fill that prescription. Tomorrow, she'd start living again.

But tonight, she allowed herself one more moment in the dark, watching the city lights flicker like fireflies, feeling both dead and alive, suspended in the beautiful, terrible space between.