Dead Things Walking

Marcus adjusted the frayed **cable** behind the television, his fingers raw from a decade of connecting strangers to worlds they'd rather inhabit. The elderly woman in the wheelchair watched him, her eyes clouded with cataracts and something deeper — the gradual erosion of self.

"You look like my son," she said. "He played **baseball**. Had this swing, beautiful like poetry. Then the accident happened."

Marcus nodded mechanically. He'd heard variations of this confession in hundreds of living rooms across the city. People saw service workers as confessionals, their transient presence safe for secrets too heavy to carry alone.

"I take my **vitamin** D every morning now," she continued. "Doctor says it helps with bones, with mood. But I think some things just wear down, don't they? Like patience. Like love."

Her words lodged somewhere uncomfortable. Marcus thought of Elena, asleep in their bed when he'd left at dawn. She didn't wake when he came home anymore. They moved through shared spaces like ghost ships, signaling silently in the dark. He'd become a **zombie** of his own making — animated but not alive, going through motions that once meant something.

The baseball anecdote had stirred something in him, though. His own father had taught him to hit, summer afternoons melting into evenings at the park. "Keep your eye on the ball," he'd say, and Marcus had understood even then that it was never about baseball.

"Ma'am," Marcus said, surprised by the thickness in his throat. "I lost my dad last year."

She reached out, papery hand covering his. "Then you know what it's to walk around half-empty."

The cable connection blinked to life, but Marcus didn't move to leave. Sometimes the thing you're paid to fix isn't the thing that needs fixing. Sometimes you just need to sit in a stranger's living room and acknowledge the weight you're both carrying, the way some losses make zombies of us all — moving, breathing, but never quite whole again.

He stayed twenty minutes. She told him about her son's swing, how the ball had soared. He told her about his father's hands, how they'd felt on his shoulder, guiding him toward something he couldn't name yet but knew he'd spend his life chasing.

When Marcus finally left, the sun was setting. He called Elena from the truck. "I'm coming home," he said. "Can we talk?"

Dead things could walk again, maybe. But first you had to acknowledge they'd died at all.