The Bear in the Throat

Marcus woke at 5:30 AM as he had for seventeen years, throat constricted around something that couldn't be swallowed. He called it the bear — that suffocating weight of expectations and responsibilities that lived somewhere between his lungs and his voice box. Some days it hibernated. Others, it clawed.

In the kitchen, his wife Elena's vitamins were arranged in their weekly plastic organizer. She'd left them behind two months ago when she'd walked out with nothing but a suitcase and a note about not wanting to become a zombie too. Marcus had started taking them himself, swallowing each capsule with desperate hope: B-complex for energy he didn't feel, Vitamin D for a darkness that had nothing to do with the sun, fish oil for a heart that had forgotten how to beat properly.

At work, he moved through meetings like a man underwater, watching himself from a distance. His colleagues called him dependable, steady. He wondered if they'd notice if he simply stopped moving altogether. The corporate zombie apocalypse wasn't about flesh-eating monsters. It was about people who had forgotten what they'd once cared about, who continued performing the motions of life while something essential rotted away inside.

On his way home, Marcus bought a bottle of whiskey and sat in his car in the garage, engine off, watching the automatic door descend. He thought about bears in nature — how they could sleep through the darkest winters and emerge hungry but alive. His bear would never hibernate. It would only pace.

His phone buzzed. A text from Elena: "I'm seeing someone. He asks how I am."

Marcus swallowed the lump in his throat, and for a moment, he couldn't tell if it was the bear finally leaving or simply making itself comfortable. He opened the car door and went inside to arrange the vitamins for tomorrow.