The Unliving Room

Mark stood in his living room at 2 AM, staring at the television where a zombie movie played on endless loop. He felt like one of them — shambling through his days at the insurance firm, consuming brains and spitting out policies, dead inside.

On the floor beside him lay a baseball mitt, dust-covered, from the summer his father had taken him to every game. Mark had played second base with a ferocity that surprised everyone. Now forty-five, he hadn't picked up a glove in twenty years. The retirement community where his father lived had no baseball diamond. No sand, no sweat, no shouts of "Think fast!" echoing against summer dusk.

He'd been swimming in debt since the divorce. Not the elegant, athletic kind of swimming he'd done in college, cutting through water with clean strokes, but the drowning kind — lungs burning, limbs heavy, always surfacing gasping. The cable bill was two months overdue. On screen, a character's arm was being torn off. Mark envied her. She felt something.

The bottle of vitamin D supplements on his coffee table caught the flickering light from the television. His doctor had prescribed them after his physical. "You're not getting enough sun," she'd said. He'd wanted to laugh. He wasn't getting enough anything.

Tomorrow he would wake at six, shower, shave, swim through traffic to the office, and return to his zombie existence. But tonight, in the blue glow of the television, watching undead flesh tear and rot, Mark finally felt something crack open inside him. Not his arm. Something deeper. Something that might, if he let it, eventually learn to feel the sun again.