The Green Hour

Marcus stood before the bathroom mirror at 11:47 PM, scraping the remnants of dinner from his teeth. The spinach had been aggressive — woven through the risotto like fibrous rebellion, now lodged between his molars like a tiny green flag of surrender. He'd made the meal because Sarah used to love risotto. That was three months ago, before she left him for someone who didn't come home from his finance job looking like something that had been drained of all essential fluids.

He was a zombie now, technically speaking. Not the pop-culture variety with rotting flesh and an insatiable hunger for brains, but something worse: the kind that still showed up to work, still made eye contact during meetings, still remembered to floss. The walking dead of corporate America, shuffling between spreadsheets and quarterly projections, hollowed out by the slow attrition of hope.

His phone buzzed on the counter. Sarah. Again.

"I think I left my grandmother's ring in the nightstand," she'd written earlier. "Can you check?"

He had checked. It wasn't there. But he hadn't replied yet. Every message from her was another brick in the pyramid he was building — not one of those majestic Egyptian wonders, but a pyramid scheme of the heart, where he kept investing emotional capital he'd already lost, hoping for some return that never materialized. She'd moved on. He was still paying installments on a relationship that had defaulted.

Marcus stared at the spinach caught in his teeth and something cracked open inside him. All this time, he'd been waiting to feel alive again, thinking Sarah held the antidote to his condition. But the zombie wasn't something that had been done to him. It was something he was choosing, every day, with every unanswered message, every secret hope that she'd realize her mistake and come back.

He spat into the sink, rinsed his mouth, and picked up his phone.

"Didn't find it," he typed. "I'll let you know if I do."

Then he deleted her contact. Not blocking — that would mean she still mattered enough to be blocked. Just removing her from the device entirely, like shedding dead skin.

The spinach was gone. The zombie was still there, somewhere behind his eyes. But for the first time in months, Marcus thought he might eventually learn to be human again.