Palm Sunday in the Dead Office

The fluorescent lights hummed at 4:47 AM when Marcus finally admitted it to himself: he was a zombie now. Not the Hollywood kind with rotting flesh and a hunger for brains. The corporate kind. The kind that showed up, typed emails, attended meetings about synergy and deliverables, and felt absolutely nothing. His iphone lay on the desk beside his cold coffee, its screen lighting up every three minutes with notifications he didn't care about. Slack. Teams. Email. His mother asking if he was coming for Thanksgiving, a holiday he'd forgotten was approaching. Marcus typed 'yes' automatically, his thumb moving on muscle memory, then stared at his palm — the creases and lines mapping a life he no longer recognized himself as living.

"You're going to die at 47," Sarah said from the next cubicle. She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at his palm, which she'd somehow grabbed without him noticing. Her fingers traced his life line with professional precision, nails bitten to the quick. "Heart attack. Probably stress."

Marcus should have pulled away. HR would have a field day; personal space, inappropriate contact, create a hostile work environment. But Sarah's touch was the first real human contact he'd felt in six months. Not the perfunctory handshakes with clients who didn't remember his name. Not the accidental shoulder-brushes in the elevator that both parties pretended hadn't happened. Actual touch. Warm. Intentional.

"I used to read palms in college," she said, her voice neutral like she was discussing the weather. "Paid my tuition that way. Eighty bucks for fifteen minutes of false hope."

"What do you see now?" Marcus heard himself ask, and was surprised by the sound of his own voice.

Sarah looked up then. Her eyes were tired, rimmed with red, matching his own. "I see someone who forgot how to want things. I see someone who's been dead since January and hasn't noticed yet."

His iphone buzzed again. Someone had mentioned him in a thread about Q4 projections. Sarah released his hand and turned back to her monitor, the moment over as quickly as it had begun. Marcus picked up his phone. The notification was a calendar reminder: 'Team Sync - 5 minutes.' He sat there for thirty seconds, feeling the ghost of her touch on his skin.

Then he opened a new email draft, typed 'Dear Sarah,' and deleted it. Typed 'Thank you,' and deleted that too. Finally, he just typed 'Palm reading tomorrow? Same time? No charge.' and hit send before his zombie brain could talk him out of it.

Three desks away, Sarah's phone chimed. She didn't look up. But Marcus saw her shoulders drop an inch, saw something return to her posture that he recognized from photographs of living people. Hope, maybe. Or just the knowledge that she wasn't the only one.

They were still zombies. They'd still be here at 4:47 AM tomorrow, typing emails they didn't care about, staring at screens that promised connection and delivered nothing. But now they were zombies together. That had to count for something. In a workplace of the walking dead, finding each other was maybe the only resurrection possible.