The Dead Days
She stared at the orange prescription bottle on her counter, the vitamin D supplements her doctor insisted she take. 'You're not getting enough sunlight,' he'd said, as if sunlight could fix the hollowed-out feeling she'd been carrying since Mark left six months ago.
Her cat, Luna, wound around her ankles, purring insistently. At least someone still wanted to be near her. Luna didn't care that Elena spent most days in sweatpants, that her consulting work had dried up, that she'd forgotten what it felt like to be interesting.
"You hungry again?" Elena asked, voice rusty from disuse. The cat meowed back, as if to say, aren't we all?
She'd become something like a zombie, really—moving through the motions of her life without truly inhabiting them. The shower at 7, the coffee at 7:30, the vitamin at 8 with breakfast she didn't taste. Then hours of staring at her laptop, sending proposals that went unanswered, while the city lived and died outside her window.
Luna jumped onto the counter and batted at the vitamin bottle, sending it rolling. Elena caught it before it tipped over the edge.
"Nice try," she said, and for the first time in weeks, something like amusement stirred in her chest.
She popped the vitamin cap open and dry-swallowed one pill. Not because she believed it would help—what could fix a life that had fundamentally lost its shape?—but because Luna was watching her with that relentless, unjudging cats-eye gaze, and something about the animal's steady presence made her want to pretend she was still the kind of person who took care of herself.
"Tomorrow," Elena told the cat. "Tomorrow I'll go outside. I'll walk to the park. I'll call my mother."
Luna blinked slowly, that gesture of profound cat-contentment, and curled into a crescent on the sunny patch of countertop.
Elena watched her and thought: maybe being a zombie wasn't permanent. Maybe it was just how some people hibernated through the dead seasons of their lives, waiting to remember what hunger felt like.
She took another vitamin. Just in case.