The Vitamin Regimen

Elena stared at the morning lineup of supplements on her kitchen counter—vitamin D for the windowless office, B-complex for the energy she no longer felt, magnesium for the sleep that rarely came. She swallowed them dry, like medicine for a soul she wasn't sure she wanted to save.

Her hair had started falling out three months after the promotion. Not dramatic clumps, just enough strands in the shower drain to make her question whether ambition was worth this slow, invisible unspooling. She'd started wearing it pulled back severely—corporate armor, professional punishment.

The elevator dinged. 47th floor.

Richard's voice echoed before she even reached the open-plan workspace. "BEAR down on those metrics, people. The client isn't interested in excuses."

She'd once found his aggressive posturing almost charming in its pathetic way. Now it just sounded like hunger. Richard was the kind of man who'd eventually consume everything around him and still claim starvation. Elena had learned to bear it—the meetings that could've been emails, the 2 AM "emergency" calls, the gradual erosion of everything that made her feel like a person rather than a function.

She walked to her desk, moving through the fluorescent-lit hive with the practiced efficiency of someone running on autopilot. Sometimes she caught herself wondering if this was what zombies felt like—not the pop-culture monsters, but something more insidious: bodies that kept going because stopping wasn't an option, minds reduced to the barest requirements of survival.

"You're wearing black again," a voice murmured beside her.

Sarah. The new senior analyst, with hair like flames and eyes that seemed to see through partitions, through personas, through the careful artifice Elena had constructed over seven years of climbing a ladder she'd stopped wanting to climb years ago.

"It's professional," Elena said, the automatic response.

Sarah's mouth curved. "It's a uniform. There's a difference."

Something twisted in Elena's chest. "What would you know about it? You've been here what, three months?"

"Long enough to notice you take more vitamins than anyone else. Long enough to recognize the look of someone convincing themselves that surviving is the same thing as living."

Elena turned away, hands trembling slightly on her keyboard. Sarah was sharp as a fox, dangerous because she didn't seem to care about the unspoken rules that kept everyone else in line.

"I heard there's a spot opening in the Seattle office," Sarah continued, voice pitched just low enough that only Elena could hear. "Starting next month. They're looking for someone who knows how to bear the weight without breaking."

Elena paused. The vitamin bottle in her drawer felt suddenly weightless.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because," Sarah said, already turning back to her work, "sometimes you have to be the one to decide when to stop taking the medicine and start healing."

That evening, for the first time in three years, Elena left the vitamins on the counter. She let her hair down. She called her sister.

The zombie, she realized, had been the one who'd forgotten she could choose to wake up.