Swiping Left on Zombie Days

Maya scrolled through her iphone, thumb moving like it had its own heartbeat. Another party. Another people hanging out without her. The brightness made her eyes burn, but she couldn't stop. Zombie mode activated—that's what she called it when she'd been scrolling for so long her brain felt like mush, her body just going through the motions. Third day in a row.

"Maya! You coming to the baseball game tonight?" Her brother's voice cut through her fog. "Liam's pitching."

Baseball. Right. The thing everyone pretended to care about because it was social suicide not to. Maya groaned into her pillow. "Maybe." She didn't mention she'd rather die than stand around the dugout pretending to understand strikeouts.

Her phone buzzed. Group chat blowing up about the party afterward, the one she definitely wasn't invited to. Funny how her goldfish memory for social cues could recall every slight, every accidental exclusion, every awkward lunch room moment from seventh grade, but she forgot to eat lunch half the time. Attention span of a goldfish, trauma memory of an elephant.

At the game, the metal bleachers burned through her jeans. Maya leaned against the chain-link fence, watching Liam throw something that made everyone cheer. She clapped because that's what you did. Her phone sat heavy in her pocket like a guilty conscience.

Then she saw it—a fox, sleek and impossible, trotting along the edge of the parking lot like it owned the place. The fox paused, looked right at her with eyes that knew something she didn't, then vanished into the woods beyond left field.

Nobody else saw it. The crowd roared at a home run. Maya stood there, heart suddenly racing, feeling strangely seen.

"Did you see that?" she asked nobody in particular.

"See what?" Someone bumped past her, spilling soda.

Maya pulled out her phone to search "fox symbolism meaning" but stopped. The fox had been real. Sharp. Wild. Nothing like this zombie scrolling existence she'd been living in.

She pocketed the phone. Watched the rest of the game. Actually watched it.

Sometimes you had to feel like a zombie before you could remember you were alive.