Vitamin for the Zombie Heart
Marcus hadn't felt alive since the divorce. He moved through his days like a zombie—automotive, automated, automatic. The fluorescent lights of his accounting firm hummed at a frequency that made his teeth ache. He'd arrive at 7 AM, leave at 7 PM, and consume nothing but coffee and the vitamin supplements his sister left on his doorstep, little orange soldiers fighting a losing battle against his gray pallor.
That's when Fox started.
Not the animal—the woman in cubicle 14B, whose hair burned the color of autumn leaves and who laughed like she knew something the rest of them didn't. Her actual name was Sarah, but Marcus called her Fox in his head because of the way she moved through the office: quick, clever, impossible to pin down.
They ended up at the same dive bar on a Tuesday, both hiding from something. She ordered whiskey. He ordered water and three vitamin C tablets from his pocket.
"You're dying," she said, not unkindly.
"I'm already dead."
"That's the problem." She slid her glass toward him. "You're not a zombie, Marcus. You're just pretending to be one because it's easier than feeling things that hurt."
They started meeting after work. She'd had her own zombie phase—a dead marriage, a miscarriage, three years of calling herself "unfeeling as stone." Now she was trying to remember how to be human again. She taught him to notice things: the way light hit buildings at golden hour, the taste of good bread, the particular shade of blue in a clear sky.
"You're my vitamin," he told her once, drunk on two beers and her presence.
"That's the worst line I've ever heard."
"No, I mean it. You're what I was deficient in."
She didn't laugh. She leaned in and kissed him, and Marcus felt something crack open in his chest, something that had been sealed shut for three years.
The affair lasted four months. They never discussed what it was—didn't have to. Fox knew he wasn't ready for more. Marcus knew she was leaving for a job in Seattle in October. It was a beautiful thing, exactly what it was, nothing more or less.
On her last day, she left something on his desk: a small amber bottle. Inside, a single fox-shaped gummy vitamin.
"For when you forget how to feel alive again," the note said.
Marcus keeps it on his windowsill. Most mornings, he doesn't need it. But sometimes, when the fluorescent lights start humming and he feels himself slipping back into automatic, he takes it out and remembers: he's not dead yet. He's just human, and that's harder, but better—so much better.