The Riddle of Hollow Bones

Marcus hadn't felt his own face in three years. Not really. He moved through the corporate corridors like something undead—**zombie**-like in his routine, gray suits blending into the carpet, his voice a hollow echo in meetings where decisions were made about things that didn't matter. Forty-two years old and already a ghost haunting his own life.

Then came the woman in the gym, **running** beside him on treadmills that faced each other across the aisle. She moved with terrifying purpose, her dark **hair** plastered to her skull with sweat, mouth open in something that wasn't quite a smile but wasn't pain either. She never looked at him, but he found himself adjusting his pace to match hers, his breath syncing to the rhythm of her footfalls.

After two weeks of this silent courtship, she finally spoke.

"You're not running toward anything," she said, not breaking stride. "You're running away."

Marcus slowed, shame burning hotter than the lactic acid in his legs. "What are you, the **sphinx**? You going to ask me a riddle now?"

She stopped. The machine whined down behind her. "I'm going to ask you if you've ever actually wanted something. Not what you were supposed to want. Not what your parents wanted. What *you* wanted."

The question hit him like **water** in the lungs—drowning, suffocating, impossible to breathe around. He thought about Lisa, asleep in their bed tonight. He thought about the promotion he'd accepted last month. He thought about the novel he'd started writing at twenty-one, abandoned somewhere in a box.

"I don't know," he said.

"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard," she said, and her hand brushed his arm—just for a second, just contact, electric and terrible and real. "Come find me when you do."

She walked away, and Marcus stood there among the clanking machines and the smell of artificial air and his own sweat, realizing that for the first time in years, he felt something. It was fear. It was hope. It was the terrible possibility that he might still become something other than dead.

He began to run again, but this time, toward something instead of away.