The Last Supper Before Everything Changed

Elena stood in the checkout line at Trader Joe's at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, clutching a singular orange and a bag of organic spinach like they were artifacts from a civilization she'd abandoned. Her wool hat—her grandmother's, smelling faintly of cedar and loss—was pulled low over eyes that hadn't truly rested in six months.

Behind her, a man in a faded security uniform shuffled forward with the gait of the undead. He placed a single frozen pizza on the belt, his movements so deliberate, so drained of vitality, that Elena thought: we're all zombies now. We're all just bodies moving through motions we've forgotten how to feel.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Marcus again. Always Marcus now, in the aftermath of it all. The messages had shifted from accusations to something softer, more dangerous. *I made that thing you like. With the spinach.* It was the culinary equivalent of a white flag, or perhaps a love letter in the language of their former life together.

She paid and walked out into the cold San Francisco night, her breath visible in the streetlamp glow. At home, Barnaby—her cat, the one consistent witness to her dissolution—wound between her legs, purring with an urgency that suggested he understood something she didn't. She dropped the spinach into a skillet with olive oil and garlic, watching it wilt like everything else in her life lately. The orange she peeled absently, its citric spray stinging her eyes.

Tomorrow she would tell Marcus about the job offer in Seattle. About the apartment she'd viewed online, the one with views of the water where maybe she could remember who she was before she became this person, this exhausted creature moving through days she couldn't distinguish from each other. But tonight she stood in her kitchen eating spinach from the pan with a wooden spoon, while Barnaby watched from the counter, and the orange sat forgotten on its peel, and she thought about how love doesn't die so much as it goes zombie—still moving, still present, but hollowed out by all the things that had once animated it.