The Weight of Light

The papaya sat on her desk, rapidly browning, like everything else in this godforsaken month. Elena had bought it on a whim at the corner market—some desperate attempt to taste something alive amid the fluorescent lights of her apartment building.

"You look like shit, El," Marcus said, leaning against her cubicle wall. He was wrong. She looked like a zombie, which was worse—walking dead who still had to attend performance reviews and pretend to care about synergy.

"My dog died yesterday."

Marcus blinked. "I thought you had a cat."

"Metaphorical dog, Marcus. The one that's been carrying my emotional labor for three years."

He laughed, but it was the laugh of someone who'd never shouldered the weight of being competent in incompetent rooms. Elena had become the designated bear at work—the creature everyone feared but needed when things went wrong, the one who roared through crisis meetings while everyone else took minutes.

Outside, lightning fractured the sky, that momentary violence before thunder reminded you of consequence. She'd watched from her window last night as storms battered the city, wondering why weather still felt dramatic when her own life was just a series of compromised mornings.

"You going to eat that?" Marcus pointed at the papaya.

"No. It's probably rotten inside."

"Most things are."

He wasn't wrong. Elena stood up, grabbed her bag, and walked past him toward the elevator. Something about the way the lightning kept striking—that insistence on being seen, even for milliseconds—made her realize she'd been performing death instead of living it.

"Where are you going?" Marcus called after her. "We have the three o'clock."

Elena pressed the button and watched the floor numbers creep toward her, understanding for the first time that the zombie's curse wasn't death. It was never realizing you'd already risen.