The Wellness Regimen

Maya smoothed her hair in the elevator mirror, noticing the gray strands multiplying like invaders at the borders. Forty-two years old and still trying to prove herself in an office where everyone moved with the glazed determination of the undead. Her colleagues—walking corpses, really—shuffled past with coffee cups like ritual offerings, eyes fixed on middle distance, souls eroded by quarterly reports and meaningless deliverables.

At her desk, she lined up her supplements in military precision: Vitamin D for the sunlight she never saw, B-complex for energy she'd stopped expecting, magnesium for the sleep that eluded her. The regimen had expanded exponentially since the divorce, each pill a tiny prayer for restoration, for the woman she used to be before grief hollowed her out.

"You look tired," said Daniel from Marketing, leaning against her cubicle wall. He was handsome in a way that made her chest ache—still possible to feel something after all.

"We're all tired," she replied, but her voice caught. They stood there as the fluorescent lights hummed their eternal note, two survivors in a building full of zombies who didn't know they were already dead.

"Want to get lunch? Real food?"

She looked at her vitamin army. "Yes."

They walked through the city, and for the first time in three years, she didn't check her reflection in shop windows. Daniel touched her arm—tentatively, like she might break—and she let herself imagine a future beyond survival ratios and gelatin capsules. Maybe the dead could live again. Maybe they all could.