Vitamin Z

The papaya sat on my kitchen counter like a tropical accusation. Three weeks since the biopsy, and I'd become someone who ate exotic fruits and took supplements with breakfast.

"You need more vitamin C," Dr. Chen had said, not looking up from my chart. "And while we're at it, maybe a multivitamin. Your body's fighting hard."

My body had been fighting for thirty-six years, mostly against sleep deprivation and my own poor decisions. But the lump in my breast didn't care about my track record.

Marcus found me staring at the papaya, still in my scrubs from the night shift.

"Baseball's on," he said, already reaching for the remote. "Yankees versus Red Sox."

I watched him settle onto the couch, his back to me. We used to watch baseball together, back when we still touched each other without planning it first, back when my worst health problem was seasonal allergies. Now he watched alone, and I stood in kitchens contemplating tropical fruits I'd never purchased before.

"I'm going for a walk," I said.

"You just got home."

"I need air."

The neighborhood was quiet at 7 AM. I passed Mrs. Gonzalez watering her lawn, waved mechanically. I felt like a zombie—moving through familiar motions, consciousness flickering like a bad connection. The living dead, that's what they called us at the hospital. The ones who worked nights and lived in the spaces between shifts, sustained by caffeine and spite.

I ended up at the corner store, staring at the vitamin aisle. Row after row of promises in amber bottles. Vitamin A for vision. Vitamin D for bones. Vitamin Z for the life I used to have.

My phone buzzed. Marcus: "Game's getting good. Come home?"

I thought about the papaya waiting on my counter, about the baseball game I didn't care about, about the vitamins that couldn't fix what was actually broken. But I bought the papaya anyway, and a bottle of orange juice with extra calcium, and walked home under a sky that was finally beginning to lighten.

Marcus was asleep on the couch when I returned, the baseball game murmuring to an empty room. I cut the papaya in half, scooped out the seeds with a spoon, and ate it standing over the sink. It tasted like resignation, faintly sweet and entirely unfamiliar.

The zombie kept moving. That was the thing about the living dead—we just kept going.