The Last Sweet Thing

Maya peeled the orange at her desk, the spray of citrus mist hitting her face like a tiny awakening. Around her, the office hummed with the familiar sound of keyboards and muted conference calls — the symphony of the walking dead. They were all zombies here, really, shuffling through their days in climate-controlled purgatory, eyes glazed over from too many spreadsheets and not enough meaning.

Her iPhone buzzed on the desk, another Slack notification from David. "Can we talk?" it read, for the third time today. She'd been dodging him since the holiday party, since that moment in the hallway when he'd looked at her with eyes that said he remembered what it was like to feel something real. But Maya had built walls over the years, thick ones, and she wasn't ready to let anyone see the decay inside.

The orange wedge was bright against the gray desk blotter, impossibly vivid. She popped it into her mouth and the flavor exploded — sharp, sweet, alive. For a second she remembered being seven years old, standing in her grandmother's kitchen, the smell of citrus and old wood and love so thick you could taste it. That version of herself felt like a stranger now, lost somewhere in the years of corporate climbs and carefully constructed emptiness.

Her phone lit up again. David was calling. Maya stared at the screen, her thumb hovering over ignore. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city sprawled like a living thing, millions of people moving through their days, some of them actually living. She thought about what her grandmother would say — about choosing the safe numbness over the possibility of pain, about letting herself become one of the undead without even noticing.

Maya answered the phone.

"Hey," she said, and the word felt like the first real thing she'd spoken in months.

"Hey yourself." David's voice was warm, uncertain. "I was thinking maybe we could grab that drink after all. If you're still... if you're still in there somewhere."

Maya looked at the remaining orange segments on her desk, small bright things against all the gray. She thought about the zombie she'd become, about the way hunger works — how you don't always know you're starving until you taste something that reminds you what food is supposed to be.

"I'm here," she said. "I'm still here."

The orange rind sat on her desk like evidence of a small rebellion, and for the first time in years, Maya didn't feel quite so dead after all.