The Last Fresh Thing

I'd been a zombie for six months since Sarah left—sleepwalking through quarterly reports and staff meetings, my skin grayish under fluorescent lights, animating only when required to speak. The divorce settlement gave her the house in the suburbs. I kept the apartment near downtown and a comprehensive catalog of empty rooms.

"You need to eat something that wasn't born in a microwave," Maya said, dropping a takeout container on my desk. Inside: bright green sautéed spinach, garlic still fragrant, pine nuts scattered like constellations. My coworker had been watching me waste away for weeks.

The first bite hit me like lightning—sudden, sharp, illuminating everything wrong with the past half year. I hadn't cooked since Sarah. Hadn't eaten anything fresh. Hadn't felt anything except a low-grade ache that I'd mistaken for permanent.

"You okay?" Maya asked.

"I forgot what food tastes like," I said, which was close enough to the truth.

That night, I bought spinach at the corner store. Standing in my kitchen, I minced garlic with a knife Sarah had chosen in Williams-Sonoma five years ago, during the phase where we thought cooking together would save us. The sizzle when it hit the pan was louder than I remembered. The scent filled rooms I'd been avoiding.

I ate standing at the counter, crying into my spinach, and for the first time in months, I didn't feel like the walking dead. I felt something worse and better: alive, and lonely, and maybe, eventually, ready for dinner with someone who didn't already know how the story ended.

The zombie hadn't died. He'd just been hungry.