The Last Green Thing

The spinach lay wilting in her grocery bag, a concession to the new diet she'd promised to start since David stopped noticing her. Six months of his mechanical lovemaking, his conversations that were really monologues delivered to the space above her left shoulder. He'd become a zombie without the death part—still walking, still working, but something essential had rotted away while the body kept moving.

Their beagle, Buster, sensed it first. He'd stopped sleeping in the bedroom, choosing the cold floor of the kitchen instead, his brown eyes following Sarah with unsettling intensity. Animals knew when the soul had left a house.

"Spinach again?" David asked without looking up from his phone, his voice flat as recycled air.

"It's good for you."

He chewed mechanically, his jaw moving in that familiar rhythm that used to mean he was thinking, now just meant he was processing food. Sarah watched his throat work, remembering when she'd trace the line of it with her fingers, when he'd catch her hand and kiss her palm like it was something precious.

"Buster threw up again," he said.

"He's old."

"Maybe we should—"

"Don't. Just don't."

The spinach tasted like nothing. Like eating green paper, like trying to nourish herself on hope that had already curdled. David's phone buzzed—work, always work—and he answered, his voice becoming animated for the first time that evening, responding to someone named Martinez about quarterly projections while Sarah scraped her plate into the compost.

Buster whined from the kitchen.

Sarah found him later, the old dog curled around the one thing in the house that still seemed alive: the spinach she'd forgotten on the counter, its leaves somehow greener in the moonlight, still reaching for something.

She sat on the kitchen floor, buried her face in Buster's fur, and finally let herself make a sound. The dog's tail thumped once against the tile—the heartbeat in a house that had forgotten how to be one.