Last Reservations

The papaya sat uneaten on her white plate, its flesh the color of a bruised sunset. Elena picked at it with her fork, watching the restaurant's candlelight dance against the wine glass. Three years of marriage, dissolved into separate apartments and Sunday night dinner reservations like this one—a zombie of a relationship that kept showing up at the door, hungry and unkillable.

"You look tired," Marcus said, not looking up from his phone.

"Work." She pressed her napkin to her mouth. "The new merger has everyone walking around like the undead."

"That's corporate life, El."

The orange silk dress she'd worn for him felt too tight now, like someone else's skin. She remembered buying it, how he'd said the color made her glow. Now it just reminded her of traffic cones and caution tape.

She thought about last night—lying awake at 3 AM, scrolling through old photos, feeling that particular kind of loneliness that only hits when you're technically not alone. That's when she'd seen it through the window: a fox, sleek and improbable, padding across her tiny balcony. It had paused, looked at her through the glass with eyes like amber glass, then vanished into the city darkness. Wild. Uncontained. Impossible.

"Marcus?"

"Hmm?" He finally looked up.

"Do you remember what it felt like? Before we became this?" She gestured between them, at the papaya growing cold, at the familiar silence that had somehow become louder than words.

He frowned. "This is good. We're stable."

"We're not stable," she said, her voice steady for the first time in months. "We're just not dead yet."

The fox had known when to run. She should learn something from that.

She signaled for the check. The zombie dinner could finally starve.