The Green Plastic Ball

The ball kept bouncing. Bouncing against the glass wall of the padel court, that rhythmic *thwack-thwack-thwack* that Marcus had become obsessed with since he turned forty-two. Elena sat in the clubhouse viewing gallery, watching him play with his new business partner, both men in neon shirts that burned against the grey afternoon sky.

She'd been a zombie for six months now — since the promotion, since the miscarriage she hadn't let herself mourn, since she and Marcus had started orbiting each other like satellites that had drifted out of sync. The word came to her one morning, staring at her reflection brushing her teeth: *zombie*. Not the movie kind, but something quieter. The walking, functioning kind.

"You should play," Marcus told her later, showered and energized, the court still clinging to him in the scent of exertion and rubber. "It's good for us. We need activities."

"I don't want activities," she said. "I want to feel something real."

They were at dinner. His plate held a steak, hers a salmon salad with spinach that had arrived wilted, brown-edged, the color of something already dead. She pushed it around her plate, watching the greens glisten under restaurant lights.

"What does that mean?" Marcus asked, not looking at her. He never looked at her anymore, not really.

"It means I'm tired of pretending everything is fine. It means padel isn't fixing anything."

The spinach on her fork looked like something pulled from mud. Suddenly she was fifteen again, standing in her grandmother's garden, pulling spinach from the earth while the old woman talked about how food grown in soil tasted like life itself. That was the last time she'd felt real — the summer she'd spent with grandmother before the hospital, before everything became appointments and performance.

"I'm leaving," she said.

Marcus's fork paused halfway to his mouth. A piece of steak fell back to his plate. "What?"

"Not forever. Just for a while. I need to remember who I was before I became this."

She waved her hand at herself, at him, at the restaurant full of couples saying nothing over expensive plates, at the life they'd built that looked perfect from the outside but had stopped growing from the inside.

Outside, the padel court lights flickered on. Somewhere, that green plastic ball was still bouncing, and somewhere else, spinach was pushing up through soil, and somewhere else, someone was coming back to life.