The Dead We Carry

The alarm on Sarah's iphone blared at 6:00 AM, as it had every morning for seven years. She reached for it automatically, her thumb hovering over the notification from Mark—*Can you meet later?*—before swiping it away without replying. The screen illuminated her face in the darkness, catching the tear she'd forgotten she was crying.

By 6:15, she stood before the bathroom mirror, arranging her daily vitamins in neat rows on the counter. Vitamin D for the artificial light of her office. B-complex for energy she didn't feel. Omega-3 for a heart that felt like it was slowly calcifying. She swallowed them dry, each pill another small death, another moment she couldn't get back.

She moved through her morning routine like something animated but not alive, a proper zombie in her tasteful beige cardigan and sensible heels. Her coworkers didn't notice—the dead rarely recognize their own kind. Mark texted again during the third status meeting of the day. Sarah watched his phone buzz on the conference table, four seats away, close enough to touch, far enough to ruin.

*This has to end,* she'd told him yesterday in the stairwell, her hand against his chest, feeling how fast his heart hammered against her palm. *This has to end,* and she'd meant their affair, but standing there with him, she wasn't sure what she meant anymore.

The drive home took her past the marina, where sailboats rocked against their moorings in the gathering dusk. Something compelled her to pull over. She walked to the end of the wooden dock, iphone silent in her pocket, vitamins digesting in her stomach, and stood looking at the black water lapping against pilings thick with barnacles.

The water smelled of salt and something else—decay, renewal, the brackish possibility of drowning or being washed clean. Far below the surface, she knew, fish moved through depths where light didn't reach. They survived without pretending. They died without orchestrating their own slow deaths meeting by soulless meeting.

Mark's text came through when she finally turned her phone back on. *I love you. Meet me tonight?*

Sarah stood at the water's edge as the last light died, and for the first time in seven years, she didn't know which way was forward. The dead walked among her, yes—but the scariest part was, she couldn't remember which side of that line she was standing on anymore.