The Zombie Who Found Sunrise

Margaret woke at 5:30 AM, exactly as she had for forty-seven years. Her **vitamin** regimen sat on the bedside table—D3 for bone health, omega-3 for her heart, B-complex for energy. At seventy-eight, she took these tiny capsules like secular sacraments, each one a promise to stay present a little longer.

Her granddaughter Chloe had given her the **iPhone** last Christmas. "So you can see the great-grandbabies grow, Grandma." Margaret still fumbled with the touchscreen, her fingers thickened by arthritis, but she had learned to navigate to the photo album. That morning, she watched a video of Chloe—twenty-four, radiant—playing **padel** at her club. The ball cracked against the racket, Chloe's ponytail swinging with each volley. Margaret felt a phantom ache in her own knees, remembering tennis matches with Arthur on the municipal courts, how they'd laugh until their sides hurt when one of them missed an easy shot.

Arthur had been gone three years now. Some mornings, Margaret moved through her kitchen ritual like a **zombie**—coffee, toast, crossword—before the world truly came into focus. She hated that word, how it suggested Arthur's death had turned her into the walking dead. But truth be told, those first few months after the funeral had been exactly that: motion without purpose, breath without life.

She shuffled to the backyard in her slippers. The **palm** tree Arthur had planted in 1987 now towered thirty feet above the house, its fronds swaying in the morning breeze like old friends sharing secrets. She placed her hand against the rough trunk, feeling the sun-warmed bark. This tree had grown up alongside their marriage, weathered the same storms, dropped its dead fronds only to grow new ones.

The iPhone buzzed. Chloe had sent another message: "Morning, Grandma! Can't wait for Sunday dinner. I'm bringing that padel racket—maybe you can try a few swings!"

Margaret smiled. The girl was persistent, just like her grandfather. Maybe Sunday she would hold that racket, feel its weight in her hands. Maybe she would even take a swing.

Inside, the coffee pot beeped. The zombie morning was already fading, replaced by something gentler: the knowledge that love, like the palm, keeps reaching upward even after shedding what no longer serves it. She picked up her vitamin bottles, counted them out one by one, and began another day.