The Last Orange

The fluorescent lights of the accounting floor hummed with that particular frequency that made Sarah's teeth ache. She sat across from Mark, watching him type. His fingers moved across the keyboard like they belonged to someone else—mechanical, rhythmic, devoid of intention. A corporate zombie in a tailored suit, hollowed out by fifteen years of spreadsheet marriage.

"I got us these," Mark said, sliding something across the desk.

An orange. Bright, absurd, alien against the gray laminate.

"For what?" she asked.

"I don't know." He opened his palm and pressed the fruit into it, his skin against hers. "Something alive."

They'd been sleeping in the same bed for eight years, occupying separate halves of the same life. She'd stopped noticing when he stopped looking at her. They moved through dinners and weekends and holiday parties like ghosts haunting their own marriage—present, translucent, fading.

Sarah peeled the orange. The scent hit her sharp and electric, citrus and memory. Their honeymoon in Barcelona. The way Mark had laughed, really laughed, head thrown back, when she'd accidentally ordered them each a shot of something that turned out to be 80-proof absinthe. How he'd looked at her then.

She split the sections between them.

Mark ate his slowly. He cried.

Not crying-pretty. crying-mess. Tears dripping onto his tie, shoulders shaking. The orange juice stuck to his fingers.

"I died," he said. "I think I died three years ago and just kept going to work."

"I know," Sarah said, and the terrifying thing was she meant it. "I've been dead since the promotion."

They sat there among the calculating machines, two zombies reclaiming their pulse one citrus segment at a time. Outside, palm trees lined the corporate campus, planted and pruned to look natural. Everything fake except this.

"We should go," Mark said.

"Where?"

"Anywhere that's not here."

She nodded. They left their unfinished spreadsheets open, walked out past security, into sunlight that felt almost too bright after years of fluorescent pallor. Sarah reached for Mark's hand. His palm was warm. Alive.

They got in the car and drove. They didn't know where. But for the first time in years, they were moving toward something instead of just away from nothing.