The Last Transmission

The coaxial **cable** had been loose for months, dangling from Julia's apartment wall like a dead snake. She hadn't bothered to fix it — what was the point? TV was just light and noise, another way to avoid thinking about how her life had become a series of automated responses.

She sat on her couch at 2 AM, the blue glow of her laptop illuminating the dark circles under her eyes. Her sister had sent her a bottle of **vitamin** D supplements with a note that said, "For when you forget what the sun looks like." Julia had taken them religiously for three days, then remembered she was 34 and her body was already halfway to ruin, and what was a pill going to do about the hollow ache in her chest?

Her phone buzzed. Mark. Again.

"We need to talk," she'd told him yesterday. But talking implied two conscious participants, and Mark was something else entirely — a man who moved through his days with the blank determination of something that had been reanimated without its soul. A corporate **zombie** in a tailored suit, who came home, asked "how was your day," and didn't wait for an answer.

Julia stood up and walked to the window. The city below was alive, really alive, with taxis and late-night pedestrians and people who felt things. She pressed her hand against the cold glass.

She'd fixed the cable earlier that evening. Connected it tight. The TV worked now, crystal clear, hundreds of channels of escape. But she hadn't turned it on.

The vitamins sat on her counter, next to her keys.

Julia grabbed her coat and walked out the door, leaving her phone behind. Some transmissions you don't answer. Some you end.