The Half-Life

The marriage had become a zombie — not dead, but moving through the days without pulse or purpose. They slept in the same bed, ate at the same table, maintained the same schedules, but the animating force had departed somewhere between year seven and the affair that almost happened but didn't.

He watched her from the kitchen doorway as she stood at the counter, bathed in refrigerator light. She was eating papaya with a fork, the fruit's flesh torn into ragged hunks. The scent of it — musk and honey — pulled him back to their honeymoon in Costa Rica, when she'd laughed with her mouth full and juice had run down her chin, when everything between them had been sticky and new and terrifyingly alive.

Now she just chewed, her jaw working in the dim light. She didn't turn around. She knew he was there.

"There's spinach wilting in the crisper," she said. "For tomorrow's smoothies."

He nodded, though she couldn't see it. Spinach. The green reminder of all the functional things they did together — vitamins and fiber and routine health maintenance, the quiet architecture of a shared life that had somehow become a cage.

He wanted to cross the kitchen and bury his face in her neck, wanted to taste the papaya on her breath, wanted to make something happen between them — anger, tears, sex, anything but this patient, careful nothing. But his feet stayed planted. That was the thing about zombies: they could move, but they couldn't choose.

"Okay," he said.

She finished the papaya, rinsed her plate, clicked off the light. In the darkness, he heard her walking upstairs, each step a familiar weight. He stood there a long time, smelling the ghost of tropical fruit, listening to the house settle around them, another day's inventory of survival complete.