The Vitamin Deficiency
Maya's palm rested against the cold windowpane, her breath fogging the glass as she watched the palm tree outside sway in the Santa Ana winds. Its fronds were brown at the edges, dying slowly, just like everything else in this godforsaken apartment complex.
Behind her, the cable news droned on—another mass shooting, another climate disaster, another reason to feel like she was living through the end times. Marcus had stopped watching weeks ago. He'd stopped doing much of anything, really.
She turned from the window and looked at him on the couch. His eyes were fixed on nothing, mouth slack. Some days she thought he was actually becoming a zombie—the slow, shuffling kind, not the screaming ones from movies. The antidepressants the doctor had prescribed might as well have been sugar pills for all the good they'd done.
"Did you take your vitamins?" she asked, not because she cared anymore but because it was what she always asked.
Marcus blinked, slowly, like his eyelids weighed too much. "Yeah. Did you?"
Maya opened her mouth to say yes, but the lie caught in her throat. The bottle sat on her nightstand, untouched for weeks. What was the point? They were just expensive placebos, another thing to buy in the futile project of self-improvement while the world burned.
She walked over to the cable box where the ethernet cable hung loose from the wall, the connection frayed. They hadn't had reliable internet in months. Neither of them had bothered to call the provider.
"Marcus," she said softly. "Do you remember when we used to be happy?"
He turned to look at her, and for a second she saw something flicker behind his eyes—recognition, maybe, or just the ghost of who he used to be. "I don't know, Maya. I don't remember much lately."
Outside, a palm frond snapped off in the wind and spiraled toward the pavement. Maya watched it fall and thought: that's us. Just waiting to break away and drift downward, not flying, just falling.
"Me neither," she said, and for the first time in months, she meant it.