Screensavers and Other Ghosts

She moved through the apartment like a zombie — not the ravenous kind from movies, but the quiet, hollowed-out kind that still goes to work and pays bills and smiles at dinner parties. Mark watched her from the doorway, clutching his iphone like a prayer. The screen lit up every few minutes with work emails, notifications, threats of urgency that felt absurd at 11 PM on a Tuesday.

"You coming to bed?" he asked, though he already knew the answer.

"Soon," Elena said, her voice thin as rice paper. She didn't look up from her phone. The blue light washed over her face, illuminating the careful neutral expression she'd been wearing for three months.

They'd been here before. Last spring, they'd ended up at a baseball game on one of their first dates, hot dogs and lukewarm beer, the sudden electric connection when their knees touched on the narrow seat. That summer, they'd adopted Buster, a neurotic terrier mix who'd bounded into the surf on his first beach trip, swimming joyfully despite his apparent terror of water. Everything had felt possible then.

Now Buster was gone — bone cancer, fast and cruel — and the space between Mark and Elena had grown like a vine in darkness, strangling and slow.

"Remember when we went swimming at Lake Tahoe?" he tried. "That night we couldn't find the motel and ended up sleeping in the car?"

Elena's thumb paused over her screen. For a second, something flickered behind her eyes. Then it was gone.

"I have a deadline, Mark."

"Right."

He retreated to the bedroom, lay awake listening to her typing in the other room. Tap, tap, tap. Like a heartbeat that no longer belonged to him. Outside, a dog barked somewhere in the neighborhood — a sound that used to make Buster lift his head from sleep, ears perked, ready to join the conversation. Now it was just noise.

Mark thought about zombies again. Not the brain-eating kind, but the people who'd died while still breathing, who moved through their days performing the rituals of life without any pulse inside. He picked up his own phone, scrolled through photos of Elena laughing in a baseball cap, of Buster mid-shake after swimming, of versions of themselves that no longer existed.

In the living room, Elena's phone chimed. He heard her laugh — a real laugh, surprised and genuine — at something on her screen.

Mark turned off his phone and closed his eyes. Some ghosts were easier to live with than others.