Vitamin Z

Martha stood in the pharmacy aisle at 11:47 PM, staring at the wall of supplements. Vitamin D for the sun she never saw. B-complex for energy she'd stopped having years ago. Melatonin to sleep through another night beside her husband—who'd become a stranger somewhere between the mortgage refinance and their daughter's departure for college.

She picked up a bottle of multivitamins, reading the label like it might contain the answer to the question she'd been asking herself for six months: *How do you stop feeling like you're already dead?*

The front door of their suburban home clicked open at 2:00 AM. David didn't even try to be quiet anymore. Martha lay in bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling fan's hypnotic rotation, listening to him move through the house like the ghost of the man she'd married. They'd become two zombies sharing a queen bed, both too exhausted to gnaw through each other's numbness.

At 3:00 AM, unable to lie still another moment, she went to the kitchen. Their cat, Barnaby—a raggedy rescue from David's bachelor days—sat by his empty bowl, staring at her with an accusation that felt entirely too personal.

"You too?" she whispered, pouring food into his bowl. "Everyone wants something from me."

Barnaby ate with the enthusiasm of someone who'd learned that survival required accepting whatever scraps were offered. Martha watched him and thought: *We're all just.Hungry. Tired. Waiting for something that never comes.*

She opened the vitamin bottle, dry-swallowed two pills without water. They stuck in her throat like small stones—hard, unyielding, pointless. What was she trying to nourish anyway? The body that went through motions? The mind that replayed the same failures? The heart that had forgotten how to feel anything but the ache of its own hollow space?

David appeared in the doorway, silhouetted against the hallway's dark. For the first time in months, they really looked at each other. The zombie metaphor cracked, just a little, revealing something underneath: not monsters, just two people who'd forgotten how to be alive together.

"Can't sleep either?" he asked.

"No," she said. "Barnaby wanted dinner."

David walked to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of wine. "Want a glass?"

Martha looked at the vitamin bottle on the counter. She thought about lying down in the dark beside him, about the possibility that feeling something together—even if it was just shared insomnia—might be better than feeling nothing alone.

"Yes," she said. "But let's sit on the porch. The stars are out."

Maybe vitamins couldn't fix them. Maybe they were both walking dead in their own ways. But at 3:15 AM, with wine and stars and a cat winding through their legs, they were at least walking in the same direction.