Green Juice and Grey Skies

Marcus stood in his kitchen at 6 AM, staring at the blender. Spinach leaves, wilted and pathetic, clung to the sides like wet underwear. He pressed the button and watched them surrender into sludge. This was his life now: post-divorce wellness, pretending that chlorophyll could fix what three years of couples therapy couldn't.

"You look like a zombie," his sister had said the night before, over gin and tonics that felt dangerously like before. "You need to move your body. Come play padel with me tomorrow."

He'd said yes because he was tired of his own silence.

The padel court smelled of rubber and despair. His sister Elena moved like she was dancing, all quick steps and calculated grace, while Marcus lurched across the blue surface, his racket feeling foreign in his hand. The ball ricocheted off the glass walls — thwack, thwack, thwack — a rhythm that almost matched the hollow thumping of his heart these days.

"You're not even trying," Elena called out, wiping sweat from her forehead. She'd always been the one who felt things, while Marcus learned the art of containment young, their mother's death forging him into someone who could survive on autopilot.

"I'm a zombie," he said, and it came out flatter than intended. "This is zombie performance art."

She didn't laugh. She hit the ball hard, deliberately, and it smacked him in the chest. "Feel that?"

"I felt that."

"Good. Now hit it back."

Something cracked open in him — anger, maybe, or just the accumulated weight of eight months holding still. He swung, connected, and the ball sailed perfectly into the corner.

"There he is," she said softly.

Afterward, they sat on a bench sharing a cardboard container of fries. The spinach smoothie waited in his car, turning brown and unappealing in the rising heat. Some things, he realized, were meant to be consumed immediately or not at all.

"I'm tired of being dead inside," he said, the confession escaping before he could swallow it back.

Elena wrapped an arm around his shoulders. "Then don't be. Start with hitting back."

The spinach smoothie went into the trash. He ordered coffee, black and bitter and alive. The ball still left a red mark on his chest, bright and stinging. He kept touching it all morning, a reminder that feeling, even when it hurt, was better than nothing at all.