The Zombie's Prescription

Marcus had been moving through his marriage like a zombie for three years—present but not alive, performing the motions of intimacy while his soul watched from a corner of the ceiling. The vitamins sat in a neat orange pyramid on his kitchen counter: D for his mood, B12 for energy, omega-3s for his heart. His wife Elena had bought them, along with the CPAP machine and the meditation app subscriptions, everything becoming part of their shared project to fix what was broken between them.

The night she left, Marcus's palms wouldn't stop sweating. He kept wiping them on his jeans, nervous energy his body finally allowed itself to feel. Elena had packed her things into expensive luggage, her movements efficient, practiced. She'd been planning this.

"You're already gone," she said, and she was right.

Six months later, his sister dragged him to a storefront psychic on a dare. The palm reader was an elderly woman with skin like crumpled paper and eyes that had witnessed too many desperate people. She took his hand, her dry fingers tracing the lines on his palm.

"You're not dead," she said, interrupting his practiced speech about vitamins and therapy and self-improvement. "You're just afraid to live."

She pressed her thumb into the center of his palm. "This is your life line. But the problem isn't its length—it's that you're reading it like a prescription. Waiting for someone to tell you what to take, what dose, when to feel better."

Marcus thought about all the vitamins. All the things he'd swallowed without tasting.

"The zombie isn't the one who died," she said softly. "It's the one who won't let himself live."

He walked out without buying anything. Later that night, he swept the entire vitamin pyramid into the trash. His hands shook. For the first time in years, his palms were dry, and he could feel the pulse beating in them—alive, uneven, terrified, and absolutely his own.