The Last Stop on Tuesday

Marcus had been a zombie for three years. Not the flesh-eating kind—that would have required more initiative—but the sort that moves through rooms on autopilot, wakes at 6:02 AM, and drives the same route to houses whose occupants he'll never see again. He was a cable technician, which felt appropriately metaphorical. He kept people connected to worlds better than their own.

Tuesday brought him to a bungalow with a dying palm tree in the front yard, its fronds brown and drooping like a hangdog's ears. The woman who opened the door held a baseball bat, not as a weapon but as something to lean against, like a third leg she'd developed overnight.

"Cable's out," she said. "Third time this month."

Marcus nodded. He'd heard this sentence twelve thousand times.

Her living room was dominated by a cardboard moving tower. "Leaving?" he asked, surprising himself.

"Husband left. Took the dog. Kept the cat though." She gestured to a calico curled on a packing box, watching them with ancient, judgmental eyes. "Figured if I was starting over, I'd start somewhere with actual seasons."

Marcus worked on the cable connection in silence. Behind the television, dust bunnies had formed a civilization. He thought about his own apartment, the boxes he'd been meaning to pack for six months, the wife who'd stopped speaking to him somewhere around year seven of their marriage. They still shared a bed. Still said "please" and "thank you." Still performed the meticulous choreography of two people who'd forgotten how to be married but couldn't remember how to be anything else either.

"There," he said, standing. "Should work now."

She handed him a glass of water. Her palm was warm against his—human contact he hadn't initiated in years. "You do this every day?"

"Every day."

"You ever think about leaving?"

Marcus thought about his mortgage, his daughter's college fund, the way his wife looked at him across the dinner table like he was a piece of furniture she'd unexpectedly grown fond of. "I don't know if I remember how."

"The cat knew," she said. "Before he left. Stared at him for weeks, like she was watching something die. Animals see it coming. They don't lie to themselves."

Marcus walked to his truck, sat in the driver's seat, and didn't start the engine. The calico had stared at him too, through the window, as if recognizing something familiar. A fellow traveler in the land of the living dead.

He reached for his phone, called in sick for the first time in twelve years, then drove toward the ocean, away from the palm trees and the perfect routine and the life that had been eating him alive one small bite at a time.