Orange Hour Zombies

The orange glow of sunset bled across Marcus's iphone 14 screen as he sat on his hotel balcony, peeling a satsuma. The sticky citrus scent should have grounded him, but he felt hollowed out—three weeks of 14-hour days at the Miami conference had turned him into something that walked and talked but wasn't quite alive. A zombie in a bespoke suit.

"You haven't slept," Clara said, stepping onto the balcony behind him. She reached for his hand, her palm warm against his cooling skin. "Marcus, this isn't sustainable."

He watched the juice run down his thumb, bright as fresh blood. "The merger closes Friday. After that, I'll—what? Decommission myself like obsolete software?"

"We used to have real conversations," she said quietly. "Now you answer emails at dinner. You check your phone during sex. I'm beginning to feel like a widow to a walking corpse."

The orange peel lay in ruins on the glass table. Marcus wanted to say something profound, something that would bridge the chasm between them, but what came out was: "I have a call with Tokyo in ten minutes."

Clara's laugh was sharp and terrible. "Of course you do."

She left him there with his citrus-stained fingers and his glowing screen, watching the sun dip below the horizon line. Later that night, he would find her gone—the closet half-empty, her perfume still clinging to the pillow they'd shared for seven years. But in this moment, sitting in the orange light that made everything look like it was burning, Marcus understood something about zombies: they didn't know they were dead until someone reached out to touch them and they felt nothing at all.

His iphone chimed. Tokyo. He wiped his sticky hands on his trousers and answered, already performing the motions of being alive.