Dead Summer

Marcus peeled the orange at his desk, the spray of citrus misting the air like the first hint of rain. Forty-two years old and this was what his life had become: a man in a gray cubicle, eating alone while spreadsheets demanded attention he no longer cared to give.

A zombie. That's what his ex-wife had called him during their final fight, her voice cracking with that particular blend of pity and contempt. "I'm married to a zombie, Marcus. You come home, you sit on the couch, you exist. But you're not there."

She'd left three months ago. The orange segments on his napkin looked like teeth, he thought idly. Then immediately hated himself for the image.

His phone buzzed. A calendar notification: "Dad's birthday dinner — 7 PM."

Marcus hadn't been to the cemetery in six months. His father had been dead for three years, but Marcus still kept the reminder. It was his way of remembering, he told himself. Another lie among so many.

The email pinged. Another urgent request from corporate. They were always urgent, these demands that meant nothing and required everything. Marcus felt it again — that hollowed-out feeling, like something essential had been scooped from his chest and replaced with clockwork.

His father's voice came to him unbidden: *You've got to keep your eye on the ball, son. The game changes, but you stay focused.*

Baseball. Every Sunday, summer after summer, they'd watched together. The old transistor radio hissing with static, the crack of the bat somehow transmitted through the haze, his father explaining plays Marcus never quite understood but loved hearing about anyway. Those afternoons had been the only time his father seemed truly present, truly alive, not weighed down by the mortgage and the mother who drank herself to sleep.

Now the same man who'd taught him about patience and strategy was buried under concrete, and Marcus couldn't remember the last time he'd felt passionate about anything.

The phone buzzed again. Same reminder. "Dad's birthday dinner."

Marcus stood up.

He walked to the window. Thirty floors below, the city churned with all its zombie workers, each of them moving in their prescribed patterns, each of them pretending this was enough.

"Not today," Marcus whispered.

He pressed delete on the calendar reminder. Then opened a new browser tab and searched for flights to Chicago — home, where his father's old transistor radio still sat in the attic, where the cemetery waited, where maybe, just maybe, a living man might still be found inside the walking dead.

The orange half in his hand smelled like hope.