The Dead Season

She drove to the funeral home wearing his baseball cap, the brim still stained with his coffee rings from that last morning at the kitchen table. Three weeks without him and she was moving through her days like a zombie—automated, hollowed out, smiling at coworkers while something essential rotted inside.

The funeral director handed her his belongings in a plastic bag. That was it. A lifetime reduced to a wallet, a wedding ring, and the hat she'd already stolen from his closet.

"He mentioned something about baseball," the director said, hesitant. "A game from twenty years ago. Kept talking about it in those final days."

She remembered. Their first date. A minor league game, cheap seats, seventh-inning stretch. He'd bought her a hat to block the sun. She'd kept it all these years.

That evening, she found herself running on the high school track, lungs burning, legs pumping, the hat jammed on her head. She hadn't run since college, hadn't moved her body with purpose since before the cancer took him. But something about the motion, the rhythm, the pure animal effort of it cracked something open in her chest.

A zombie learns to feel again through pain, she thought, somewhere between mile three and four. The sun set behind the bleachers, and she remembered what he'd told her that night at the game:

"You never really lose the people you love. They just move into a different season."

She kept running, tears cutting tracks through the grime on her face, toward whatever came next.