The Decay Between Us

The spinach was stuck between his teeth—right there in the front, a jagged green banner announcing his surrender to the ordinary. Marcus had stopped caring months ago, somewhere between the promotion he didn't want and the mortgage that tethered us to a life neither of us had imagined.

"You've got something," I said, gesturing to my own front tooth.

He didn't flinch. Just kept chewing, staring past me at the orange wall we'd painted together three years ago, back when we still believed color could change something fundamental about who we were. The paint was peeling now in the corner behind his head, curling away from the drywall like dead skin.

"Maybe," he said, swallowing without checking the mirror.

That was when it hit me: Marcus had become a zombie. Not the movie kind with rotting flesh and hunger for brains, but something far more terrifying—a man who kept moving through the motions of living while whatever had made him *him* had already departed. He went to work. He came home. He slept beside me without touching me.

I stood up and walked to the bathroom, avoiding my own reflection. My hair—once the thing he said he loved most about me, the wild dark curls he'd bury his face in—had been pulled into a severe bun for months now. Practical. Uninviting. Safe.

When I returned, Marcus was still staring at the peeling orange wall. The spinach was gone.

"I met someone," he said.

The words hung in the air between us, and the terrible thing was that I didn't feel surprise. I felt relief. Finally, a plot development. Finally, something other than this endless gray wandering.

"Her name is Sarah," he continued. "She has this laugh—"

"Don't," I said. "Please don't."

"I'm already gone, Elena. I have been for a long time."

I looked at him—really looked—at the gray streaks in his hair, the spinach that had been there and then wasn't, the way his eyes refused to meet mine. He was right. We'd been eating each other's hearts for years, and neither of us had tasted anything in so long.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Go be alive somewhere else."

Later that night, after he'd packed a bag and left, I stood in the kitchen and ate spinach from the container—cold, raw, straight from the plastic. For the first time in years, something tasted like something.