The Zombie Summer

Margaret had become a zombie of her former self somewhere around month three of David's decline. Not the flesh-eating kind, but something more insidious: the walking, breathing woman who moved through rooms she'd once loved with the precision of a ghost haunting her own life.

Every morning at 5 AM, she drove to the community pool. Swimming was the only time her brain shut up. Twenty laps back and forth, the water silencing everything — the hospital bills piled on the kitchen counter, the way David now looked at her like she was a stranger who'd wandered into his room, the hollow echo of a house that had stopped feeling like home somewhere between the diagnosis and the first fall.

The cat, Buster, refused to enter David's room anymore. He'd sit in the hallway, tail twitching, staring at the doorway with what Margaret increasingly recognized as judgment. Animals could smell the wrongness of things. They knew when a body had become a vessel for something else, when the person they'd curled against for years was now just biology pretending to be continuity.

"You're swimming again," her sister said on the phone, the accusation barely veiled. "It's been two weeks since you visited."

"The water helps."

"David's your husband, Marge. Not a choice."

She didn't know how to explain that she saw David every day. In the way her hand still reached for him in sleep, in the coffee mug she absentmindedly poured for two each morning, in the zombie shuffle of her own movements through rooms that held eighteen years of marriage she couldn't access anymore.

That evening, she found Buster finally in David's room, curled at the foot of the bed, purring loudly. David was asleep, his face softened in a way it hadn't been while awake for months. Margaret sat in the chair beside him, still wet from her swim, and watched the rise and fall of his chest.

The zombie wasn't David. It was the life they'd built together — the mortgage, the retirement accounts, the carefully constructed future that had dissolved with four words from a neurologist. She'd been moving through the wreckage, pretending she could rebuild something from the debris.

She reached out and rested her hand on David's ankle, feeling the warmth of him beneath the blanket. Buster opened one yellow eye, then closed it again.

"I'm still here," she whispered to the room, to the cat, to the man who was and wasn't her husband. "I'm still swimming."

Somewhere in the house, a phone began to ring. She didn't move to answer it.