The Maintenance of Living

Elena sat on the edge of the bathtub, staring at the orange plastic bottle. **Vitamin** D, the doctor had said. You don't get enough sunlight in that windowless office. She dry-swallowed two capsules, feeling them click down her throat like small stones.

Three years ago, Mark would have made fun of her for this. He'd called supplements "expensive pee" and sunscreen "for people who don't know how to live." But Mark wasn't here anymore. Not really.

He sat in the living room now, bathed in the flickering blue light of the television, eyes glazed. The **cable** bill was the only thing they still paid on time, $147.99 a month for the privilege of watching other people live fictional lives while theirs unraveled.

"Elena?" His voice drifted in, hollow and distant.

"In here," she called back, but didn't move.

She remembered the Mark who used to wake her with terrible coffee and worse jokes, who danced in grocery store aisles, who'd once driven them three hours north just to see the ocean at midnight. That Mark had decayed so gradually she'd barely noticed — first the long silences, then the missed appointments, then the days spent in pajamas, staring at screens.

The doctor called it treatment-resistant depression. Elena called it something else privately, in the dark of their bedroom while Mark snored beside her, oblivious. He was becoming a **zombie**, hollowed out from the inside, something wearing her husband's skin and speaking with his voice but devoid of everything that had made him him.

The bathroom mirror showed her own reflection — pale, tired, the lines around her mouth deepening. She swallowed two more vitamins. B12 this time. For energy. For hope. For the illusion that she could fix this with enough discipline, enough love, enough chemicals.

"You coming to watch?" Mark called. "They're doing a marathon."

Elena stood up, her joints popping. She looked at the vitamin bottles lined up on the sink like tiny soldiers, marched out in pointless formation. She walked toward the living room, toward the blue light and the man she used to know, toward another night of pretending that maintenance was the same thing as living.