The Green Things We Keep

The word zombie floated through Elena's mind as she stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror at 2 AM. Dark circles hollowed her eyes. Her skin had that grayish cast of someone who'd forgotten what sunlight felt like. She'd worked fourteen hours, came home to Marcus asleep on the couch with takeout containers scattered like battlefield debris, and now she couldn't sleep.

Their Golden retriever, Buster, nudged her thigh with his wet nose. He was the only one who noticed she existed anymore. She'd found him three years ago behind a dumpster, shivering and matted, and brought him home the same week Marcus stopped looking at her like she was someone he wanted to know.

Elena padded to the kitchen. The refrigerator light revealed her shame: spinach turning slimy in the crisper drawer, three separate containers of wilted arugula, a bag of pre-mixed greens she'd bought with such optimistic intentions last Tuesday. Every grocery trip, she bought vegetables like they were promises. Every week, she threw them away like confessions.

"You're becoming a ghost," her sister had told her last month. "Marcus too. I watched you two at dinner, and it was like watching two zombies sitting across from each other."

She'd gotten angry. Defended her marriage. But here she was, eating spinach from the bag with zombie hands, standing over the sink while her husband slept down the hall and her dog watched with those patient eyes.

Buster whined, pressed his side against her leg. She sank to the kitchen floor, buried her face in his golden fur, and finally let herself cry about the spinach, about Marcus, about how she'd become someone who purchased her aspirations in plastic bags and watched them die, week after week, while telling herself next time would be different.

The zombie stared back from the darkened window. For the first time, she recognized her own face.