The Lightning We Forgot

Another dinner of spinach and quiet resentment. Elena pushed the wilted leaves around her plate while Marcus stared past her, eyes glazed, his mind somewhere in the tomorrow he'd already checked out of. Three years of marriage and she'd become a background character in his own personal zombie apocalypse — not the dead kind, the living kind, the ones who shuffle through daily routine with their souls already gone.

'You dyed your hair,' he said, finally seeing her.

'Orange. Yes. Last week.' She touched the bright copper strands. 'You noticed now?'

Lightning cracked the sky open, sudden and violent, flooding their kitchen with white light. For a split second, she saw how pale he'd become, how the hollows of his cheeks had deepened, how his own hair — once so thick and dark — was thinning at the temples. When had they started aging? When had they become strangers who shared a bed?

'I'm sorry,' Marcus whispered. The admission startled her more than the thunder.

Outside, rain began to fall, hard and sudden, washing the world clean. Elena set down her fork, spinach forgotten. She reached across the table and took his cold hand. His fingers curled around hers, desperate, clinging.

'Me too,' she said.

The storm raged on as they sat in the kitchen's half-light, two people deciding whether to let the lightning burn them down or build something new from the ashes. Somewhere between the thunder and the spinach, they remembered they were still alive.