The Last Padel Game

The zombie apocalypse had already happened, but nobody noticed because we all still showed up for work. Elena moved through the marketing department like the walking dead — gray eyes, gray soul, graying hair that she stopped coloring six months ago. At 44, she'd stopped caring about the careful performance of youth that had defined her twenties.

She found herself at midnight on a padel court, the blue glass walls echoing with every desperate hit of the ball. Her opponent was Marcus from Accounting, twenty years her senior, with thinning hair and a paunch that pressed against his polo shirt. They played three times a week in silence, the only time Elena felt anything resembling alive.

"Your serve," Marcus said, bending to retrieve a ball.

Elena's phone buzzed on the bench — another email from Sarah, the new VP with fox-red hair and sharper instincts. Sarah had been quietly dismantling everything Elena had built over the past decade, smiling while she did it. The corporate bear that ate you whole and never even bothered to wipe its mouth.

"You going to get that?" Marcus asked.

"No." Elena served instead, the ball cracking against the glass wall. "I'm done being that person."

Marcus straightened slowly. "What person?"

"The one who cares." Elena leaned against her padel racket, chest heaving. "The zombie who keeps showing up. The fox who keeps pretending. The bear who keeps carrying everyone else's bullshit."

Marcus studied her for a long moment. "My wife left last week," he said quietly. "Said I'd been dead inside for years."

Elena's hands stilled. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Marcus hit a ball against the wall, watched it bounce back. "She was right. I think we're all just... waiting for something to feel real again."

The automatic lights timed out, plunging them into darkness. They stood there breathing, two people who'd forgotten how to be alive.

"Play again tomorrow?" Elena asked finally.

"Same time," Marcus said.

They walked to their separate cars in the parking lot, and for the first time in months, Elena felt something stirring inside her chest. Not hope exactly. But maybe the beginning of the end of the zombie that wore her face.