The Riddle of Dead Things

The fox came at dusk, the same evening Elias told Clara he felt like a zombie.

It wasn't the dramatic declaration he'd rehearsed. They were sitting at their respective ends of the dining table, laptop screens glowing between them like wall-of-Jericho barriers. Clara's fingers moved across her keyboard with the precision of a concert pianist, though she was just replying to emails about something called "synergy alignment."

"I feel dead inside," Elias said, the words dropping onto their heirloom placemats like stones. "Not sad. Not angry. Just... undead. Walking around, eating, sleeping, but something essential is gone."

Clara didn't look up. "We talked about this in therapy, Elias. The existential void of corporate—"

"No. Not that." He set down his wine glass with deliberate care. "I mean us."

She stopped typing.

Outside their dining room window, a fox trotted past the glass— russet coat ghosting through their suburban dusk, eyes bright with secrets. It paused, looked in at them, and Elias had the irrational certainty that it knew something he didn't.

Clara finally turned from her screen. Her expression was sphinx-like: inscrutable, ancient, devastatingly patient. She'd been like this for months—guardian of riddles she wouldn't share, keeper of doorways she refused to open.

"What do you want me to say?" she asked.

"Anything. Everything. That you feel it too. That you don't. That you're staying because of the mortgage, because it's easier than starting over. That you're staying because you still love me, even though you can't remember why."

The fox was gone now—vanished into the neighbor's arborvitae like a flame snuffed out.

Clara stood up. She walked around the table, placed her hand on his shoulder. Her touch was so light he might have imagined it.

"I'm not staying because of the mortgage," she said. "I'm staying because I'm waiting to see if you'll wake up."

"Wake up?"

"Stop waiting for permission to be alive." She bent close, her breath warm against his ear. "You think you're the only one who's been walking around dead?"

She kissed his cheek—once, chaste as a benediction—then walked out of the dining room, leaving her laptop open behind her, cursor blinking like a small, patient heart.

Elias sat alone with his wine and the metaphorical ghosts between them, realizing she'd just given him the first real answer in three years. The riddle wasn't why they were both zombies together. The riddle was what they might become if they chose to resurrect themselves—separately, or together, or not at all.

He finished his wine, stood up, and followed her into the dark.