Running on Empty

Margaret found the first gray hair three months after David stopped looking at her.

It wasn't that he'd stopped seeing her. He still noticed when she moved his keys, when she bought the wrong brand of cereal, when her laughter was too loud in restaurants. But the *looking*—the kind that made her feel visible, desired, perceived—that had evaporated sometime between their tenth anniversary and the promotion that turned him into a corporate zombie.

The dog, Barnaby, sensed it first. The golden retriever had stopped greeting David at the door, choosing instead to curl tighter around Margaret's feet on the couch. The cat, Luna, watched David with predatory yellow eyes from her perch atop the bookshelves, as if waiting for the moment she might finally pounce.

Margaret started running at dawn.

It began as a New Year's resolution, something to fill the hollow hours between David's departure for work and her own meaningless spreadsheets. But it became something else—a way to feel something, anything, in the numbness that had settled over their life like carbon monoxide, odorless and deadly.

Her feet hitting the pavement. Her breath coming hard. The pain in her calves. These were real things in an unreal life.

This morning, David's phone had buzzed with a text at 3 AM. Margaret had watched him from the bathroom doorway, silhouetted against the blue light of his screen, his face slack and unrecognizable. The zombie again, animated by something that wasn't hunger or desire or love.

She tied her shoes now as the sun breached the horizon, pink and tentative.

"Coffee's made," David called from the kitchen. The zombie could still perform basic functions.

"Not today," she said, and opened the front door.

Barnaby lifted his head, hope flaring in his warm brown eyes. Luna watched from the windowsill, tail twitching with ancient, feline wisdom.

Margaret stepped onto the porch and didn't look back at the house, at the life, at the marriage she'd outgrown. She began to run.