Supplements for the Living Dead

The first year after the divorce, Elena moved through her days like a **zombie** — not the Hollywood kind with decaying flesh and hunger for brains, but something worse: a woman thirty-eight years old who had forgotten how to want anything at all.

She'd taken to wearing Marcus's old fedora, that ridiculous **hat** he'd bought on a whim in New Orleans and never worn again. It sat crooked on her head, a tilted crown over her empty kingdom. Her coworkers at the firm noticed but said nothing. In the corporate world, wearing your dead marriage like an accessory was just another flavor of breakdown.

The morning everything changed, she stood in her bathroom, staring at the orange plastic bottle of **vitamin** D supplements. The doctor had prescribed them after she mentioned feeling tired all the time. "Seasonal affective disorder," he'd said, like it was something that could be fixed with a daily pill.

She dry-swallowed one, the chalky taste catching in her throat. Then another. Then five more.

"What are you doing?" a voice asked.

Elena jumped. Her reflection in the mirror hadn't spoken. She turned to find her neighbor, Simon, leaning in the open bathroom door. She'd left it unlocked again.

"I don't know," she said. And she didn't. That was the problem.

Simon, the accountant from 4B who she'd exchanged maybe twenty words with in three years, stepped closer. He was wearing a suit, too formal for 8 AM. "I knocked. You didn't answer. The door was open."

"I'm not okay," Elena said, the words falling out of her like she'd been holding them behind a dam.

"I know." He reached out, took the vitamin bottle from her hand, set it on the counter. "My wife left two years ago. I spent six months sitting on my couch watching my plants die."

She looked at him really then — the lines around his eyes, the way his tie was slightly crooked. He was, like her, a survivor of something that hadn't killed him but had left marks all the same.

"The hat," he said, gesturing to her head. "It doesn't suit you."

"No," she agreed. "It doesn't."

"Coffee later? After work?"

Elena thought about saying no. She thought about the comfort of her routine, the safety of her numbness. But then she looked at the vitamin bottle, at the pills that were supposed to fix what was broken inside her, and she realized some things can't be supplemented.

"Yes," she said, taking off the hat and setting it on the counter beside the vitamins. "Yes, coffee would be good."

Outside, the morning was bright, almost aggressively alive. For the first time in a year, Elena stepped toward it instead of away.