The Dead Pool

The office betting pool sat on Maya's desk, names scrawled in blue pen: twenty bucks on Rodriguez from Accounting, fifteen on Sarah from HR. They called it the dead pool, but really it was just who'd be next when the zombie company finally shuddered its last breath.

Maya hadn't written her own name. She'd stopped wearing her "bear the pain" hat months ago—that endless positivity her manager insisted on, the corporate brim pulled low over her eyes so she couldn't see the rot spreading through the foundation. But she saw it now, in the way Gabriel's hands trembled as he signed yet another resignation letter.

"You're really leaving?" she asked, not because she cared, but because she needed to know how it felt to still be capable of movement while everyone else shuffled through fluorescent-lit corridors like the walking dead.

Gabriel looked up, and Maya saw something she hadn't noticed before—the way his eyes were clear, alive. "Found something real. Not this."

He left his hat on the desk. A baseball cap, worn at the brim. Maya picked it up and smelled it—sunlight and possibility and the faint scent of a woman's perfume. Not his wife's.

Later, she'd drive to the neighborhood pool, the one they all pretended was a luxury amenity but was really just a grave for unused memberships. She'd strip down to her swimsuit and lower herself into the lukewarm water, float on her back while the sky bruised purple above her. In the water, weightless, she could almost believe she wasn't bearing the weight of every unfinished project, every hollow promise, every night she'd lain beside her husband and wondered when they'd both given up the ghost.

The water lapped against her skin like a question she couldn't answer. Maybe she was the zombie after all—moving, breathing, but somehow already gone.

Then her phone buzzed in her pile of clothes. A new message from Gabriel: "I know what you're thinking. Don't wait."

Maya sank beneath the surface, held her breath until her lungs burned. When she emerged, gasping, she finally understood what it meant to choose resurrection.