The Living Dead of Us

The first time I noticed it was a Tuesday, over takeout noodles that had gone cold. Marcus was staring at me with those dead eyes — really looking through me, not at me — and I thought: somewhere along the way, my husband became a zombie. Not the brain-eating kind. The office kind. The forty-hour-week, fluorescent-light, spreadsheet-dulled kind where the person you love is still there, physically, but the light behind their eyes has been systematically extinguished by budget meetings and performance reviews.

"You okay?" I asked, nudging his foot with mine.

"Fine," he said. The word fell flat between us. He didn't remember asking me that question anymore. He didn't remember being the kind of person who asked.

That's when Luna, our cat, jumped onto the table and knocked his pork lo mein onto the floor. She'd been doing that lately — knocking things over, yowling at 3 AM, staring at corners of the ceiling like she was seeing ghosts. The vet said cats pick up on household stress. I think she was just the only one willing to acknowledge that something had died in this apartment.

I remembered the night Marcus proposed. We'd been friends for three years before anything happened between us, and when he finally kissed me, we were wearing those ridiculous hats from that dive bar on 4th Street — fedoras that made us look like terrible jazz musicians. We laughed so hard we cried. He looked at me then like I was the only thing in the world worth seeing.

Now he looked at me like I was another item on a to-do list.

"I'm thinking about quitting," he said suddenly.

My heart did something complicated. "Your job?"

"Everything." He pushed his chair back. "This. Us. I don't know."

Luna wound around his legs, purring like she knew something I didn't. The zombie in front of me flickered — just for a second, something real behind those dead eyes. Fear, maybe. Or the first stirring of wanting to be alive again.

"Remember my hat?" I asked. "The one I made you leave at the bar?"

He actually smiled. Not the automatic, practiced smile. The real one. It transformed his whole face. "I still have it."

The zombie wasn't gone. But maybe, just maybe, my friend was still in there somewhere, waiting for someone to call him back to life.