Dead Things Running

The alarm went off at 4:30 AM, as it did every day, and Elena dragged herself from bed like a corpse reluctantly reanimated. She was forty-two, divorced, and so thoroughly hollowed out by middle management that she'd begun to wonder if the dead were simply people who'd stopped pretending.

Running was supposed to fix this. The magazines promised it. The podcasts swore by it. Run toward the person you want to become, they said, as if direction alone could manufacture meaning. So she ran. Three miles before dawn, through the sleeping streets of her gentrified neighborhood, past the manicured lawns and windows dark with the sleep of people who perhaps had not given up.

"You look like a zombie," her mother had said the last time they'd spoken, and Elena had laughed because it wasn't an insult anymore. It was taxonomy. She was something that walked and spoke and filed quarterly reports, but the animating force—the thing that made a life a life—had apparently departed years ago, unnoticed and unmourned.

She stopped at the pool on her way home, as she did on mornings when running didn't exorcise whatever this was. The water was still and dark, chlorinated and waiting. Swimming was different from running. You couldn't think in water. Thoughts drowned in the rhythm of breath and stroke, in the muffled world beneath the surface where everything was blue and suspended and weightless.

She dove. The cold shocked her skin, and for a moment she was somewhere else entirely—twenty-five, in love, certain that the future would be kinder than the past. She'd made smoothies then, with spinach and banana and protein powder, convinced that if she treated her body like something sacred, her soul would follow. She'd been so earnest. She'd believed so hard in things that hadn't believed back.

She surfaced, gasping. The sky was lightening, pale and gray as old bone.

A lifeguard appeared at the pool's edge—young, hungover, smoking a cigarette. "We open at six," he said.

Elena nodded, treading water. "I know."

"You come here every morning?"

"Yes."

He looked at her, really looked at her, and she wondered what he saw. A woman her age, wealthy enough, attractive enough, with a job that paid for therapy she couldn't make time to attend. What was there to mourn?

"My grandmother used to swim like that," he said. "Every morning. Said it kept the dead away."

Elena treaded water, watching the smoke drift against the sunrise. "Did it work?"

He shrugged. "She died anyway. But she looked good doing it."

She laughed, surprising herself. The sound was small and real, and for a moment the water didn't feel like something to drown in, but something to float in.

"Spinach," she said.

"What?"

"Nothing. Just—something I used to put in smoothies. Before."

"Before what?"

"Before I forgot how to be alive."

The lifeguard put out his cigarette. He didn't look away. "You're here, aren't you?"

She swam to the ladder and pulled herself up, dripping and shivering in the morning air. The world was beginning to stir. Cars starting. People rising. All of them running toward something, or away, or simply in place, doing the best they could with whatever they had left.

"Yes," Elena said, wrapping herself in a towel. "I suppose I am."