The Zombies We Become

Mara hadn't meant to become a zombie. It happened gradually, like rust or wisdom, until one Tuesday morning she caught her reflection in the subway window and saw someone else entirely. Her eyes were flat. Her mouth hung slightly open. The woman staring back was no one she recognized.

She stared at her phone instead.

"How was your weekend?" Elena asked from the adjacent cubicle. Elena who called herself Mara's friend, who invited her to drinks every three months, who liked all her posts but never remembered anything Mara actually said.

"Fine," Mara said. "Yours?"

"Great! We went to that new place in Williamsburg. You should come next time."

"Maybe," Mara said, already forgetting.

Her phone buzzed. Her mother: "Your cousin's getting divorced. Everyone saw it coming. Remember when you almost married Mark?"

Mara typed: "I'm working."

She wasn't. She was staring at the spreadsheet she'd been updating for three years. The numbers blurred together like watercolor. She thought about the stray cat she fed on her fire escape—how it watched her with eyes that seemed to know everything, how it disappeared for weeks and returned thinner, hungrier, but somehow still entirely itself. Unlike her. Unlike everyone in this fluorescent-lit building.

"Meeting in five," Elena said, already turning away.

Mara stood up. Her legs moved mechanically. Her hands gathered her notebook. The zombie that wore her face went to do its work.

That night, she left her phone inside. She sat on the fire escape with a saucer of milk. The cat appeared from nowhere—black, sleek, unapologetic. It ate slowly, watching her with those ancient amber eyes.

"You're the only real thing," Mara whispered.

The cat finished, licked its paw with rough pink tongue, and jumped into her lap. It purred, a sound like rain on a tin roof, and for the first time in months, something in Mara's chest cracked open. She cried into the cat's fur, and the cat let her, patient and utterly indifferent to her job performance, her undefined dread, the expectations she couldn't name.

The zombie receded. Not gone—she'd be back tomorrow, when the alarm screamed at 6:30 AM and the subway carried her underground. But for tonight, holding this creature who demanded nothing and offered everything, Mara remembered what it felt like to be alive.