Supplemental Existence

The dead don't always stay buried. Some of them show up at 8 AM every Monday, wearing polyester blend and carrying lukewarm coffee.

Elena had been a corporate zombie for three years when the fox appeared.

Not a literal fox—that would have been preferable. It was Marcus, the new consultant from London, with sharp features, amber eyes, and a smile that suggested he knew exactly which corporate throats to tear out. He moved through the office like a wild thing, suspiciously alive in a roomful of walking corpses.

"You're taking vitamin D supplements," he said, sliding into the chair across from her in the break room. It wasn't a question.

Elena looked up from her spreadsheet. "How could you possibly know that?"

"Your skin," he said, tapping his own cheek. "And the way you blink. You blink like someone who's forgotten what sunlight feels like."

He was right, of course. She'd been working nights for months, a zombie by any other name. The vitamins sat in her kitchen cabinet, a daily ritual of attempted resurrection that never quite took.

"I read a study," Marcus continued, leaning closer. His cologne smelled like cedar forests and bad decisions. "Apparently, most supplements are just expensive urine. The body only absorbs what it's ready to process."

"Is this your consulting pitch?"

"This is me saying you can't force what isn't there." His hand brushed against hers, electric and terrifying. "Some things have to be organic."

They began meeting in the server room during lunch breaks. His name tasted like iron and want. His mouth discovered hers in the dim blue light of humming machines, and for twenty minutes, Elena wasn't dead anymore.

"I can't keep doing this," she whispered three weeks later, adjusting her skirt. "I'm married, Marcus."

"You're also dying," he said simply. "Bit by bit. I can see it. The vitamin D isn't helping because your body knows you're not actually living."

He left the company two months later—another fox through the hedgerow, gone before the hounds could catch his scent. Elena found the bottle of vitamins on her kitchen counter and threw them in the trash.

She called her lawyer the next day. Some resurrections, she realized, don't come in pill form. Sometimes you have to eat your own heart to start it beating again.