The Last Living Soul on Floor 7

Sarah's blender died at 6:47 AM, taking her morning spinach smoothie with it. She stared at the green sludge splattered across her kitchen counter, wondering if this was some kind of sign. The vitamin C supplements she'd started taking last week—doctor's orders for stress—sat untouched beside her destroyed breakfast.

She took the subway anyway, her hands stained green. The commute crowd looked as usual: rows of blank faces tilted toward phones, eyes glazed, mouths slightly open. Zombies, she thought. Everyone moving through their routines, already dead but somehow still walking.

Floor 7 of the accounting firm smelled like stale coffee and despair. Sarah had worked there for seven years. She was thirty-two.

"Did you finish the Henderson report?" asked Mark from the adjacent cubicle. Mark had been there twelve years. He had the kind of face that forgot how to express surprise.

"Almost," Sarah said, but the numbers swam before her eyes. Last night she'd calculated that she spent approximately 1,825 hours annually in this cubicle—seventy-six full days. She'd given away seventy-six days per year to spreadsheets that didn't matter to anyone, least of all the Hendersons.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her neighbor: "Can you walk Buster again? Emergency dental surgery."

Sarah's relationship with Buster—her neighbor's golden retriever—was the most genuine connection she had. The dog greeted her with an enthusiasm that made her chest ache, alive in a way she'd forgotten was possible. Sometimes she stood in the park with him and thought: I'm taking care of a living thing. That means something, doesn't it?

That evening, after the Henderson report was submitted (late, but submitted), she walked Buster as the sky turned that particular purple that comes just before real dark. The dog pulled at his leash, tail wagging with the fierce joy of existing.

A man sat on a nearby bench, reading a book—a novel, something with actual pages. He looked up as Buster approached, interested.

"Good boy," he said, and his voice was kind. He said it like he meant it.

"I'm sorry," Sarah said. "He's friendly."

"It's okay." The man smiled. "I like dogs. They're better than most people."

"They really are," she said, and for the first time all day, she meant it.

Buster sat between them, panting happily, and the three of them stayed there as streetlights flickered on, one by one. Sarah thought about the spinach on her counter, the vitamins she kept forgetting, the zombie commuters and the endless spreadsheets. She thought about seventy-six days a year, seven years gone, and how a golden retriever and a stranger on a bench might be the only things that felt real.

"What are you reading?" she asked.

He showed her the cover.

"I've been meaning to read that," she said, and it wasn't a lie.

They talked as darkness gathered around them, and Sarah realized she didn't want the conversation to end. She didn't want to go home to her quiet apartment, didn't want to wake up tomorrow and rejoin the walking dead.

Buster leaned against the man's leg, content, and Sarah understood something important: being alive wasn't automatic. You had to choose it, every day, sometimes in the smallest ways.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"James," he said. "Yours?"

"Sarah."

"Sarah," he repeated, like it was something precious. "Nice to meet you."

Later, walking home with Buster, she stopped at a grocery store and bought fresh spinach. She'd get a new blender tomorrow. She'd remember to take her vitamins. She'd text James.

The zombies could keep floor 7. She was done being one of them.