The Dead Alive

Marcus stood before his bathroom mirror at 6:47 AM, toothbrush hanging from his mouth, staring at the vitamin supplements lined up like tiny soldiers on the counter. Vitamin D for the fluorescent office prison. B-complex for the stress knots between his shoulders. Omega-3s for his brain, which seemed to be slowly dissolving into corporate fog.

He swallowed them dry. He'd become a zombie three years ago, though no one had noticed. The walking dead at Midtown Asset Management didn't shamble or moan. They wore fitted suits and said things like "circle back" and "touch base." They had retirement plans and carefully curated Instagram feeds. They just happened to be dead inside.

His lunch that day was a spinach salad that tasted like despair and refrigerator cold. He ate it while watching his coworker Sarah cry silently in the breakroom. She was running on fumes too—running from a divorce, running toward a deadline, running just to keep moving because stopping meant feeling.

"I bought a bull," she said between sobs, apropos of nothing. Marcus paused, his plastic fork hovering over a wilting spinach leaf. "A miniature bull. For my daughter's birthday. She turns seven next week and I haven't seen her in three months because the custody arrangement is..." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Anyway. It's a miniature bull. It lives at a petting zoo now. I pay for its feed. It's the only thing I own that's real."

Marcus thought about the bull. Something stubborn and alive in a world of dead things.

That afternoon, his boss called him into a glass-walled office to discuss his "declining metrics." The fluorescent lights hummed like insects. Marcus thought about Sarah's bull, eating grass somewhere, stubbornly alive, stubbornly itself.

"I need you to engage more," his boss said. Marcus nodded, his zombie heart beating its slow, dead rhythm.

Later, standing at the intersection of 42nd and 3rd, waiting for the walk signal, Marcus felt something stir in his chest. Not much. Just the faintest memory of being alive. He thought about vitamins that didn't work and spinach that tasted like nothing and a bull he'd never seen. The signal changed. He didn't move. The crowd surged around him, flowing forward like water past stone. Marcus stayed where he was, and for the first time in three years, he was neither running nor standing still.

He was just beginning to wake up.