Vitamin Z

The alarm at 5:30 AM. Marcus swallowed the vitamin C tablet without water, let it dissolve slow and bitter on his tongue. He'd read somewhere that taste was the last sense to go, and some mornings, checking felt necessary.

The office elevator deposited him on the twelfth floor at 7:02 AM. Twelve years at this firm, and he'd become what his younger colleagues called a zombie behind his back—the senior associate who moved through meetings like a specter, present and not present, somehow closing deals while his soul had quietly clocked out.

"You look like hell," Sarah said, appearing beside him at the coffee machine. She was twenty-four, devastatingly alive, with orange-streaked hair that seemed intentionally defiant against corporate beige. "Rough night?"

Marcus almost told her. About the elephant sitting in his living room in the form of his estranged brother's parole hearing. About how he'd lay awake wondering if he could bear seeing him again, if he could bear not to. Instead he said, "Just tired."

She studied him over her coffee cup. "My mom reads palms. She says the left hand shows what you're born with, right hand what you make of it. You've got survivor lines." She touched his wrist, fingers light and impossibly warm. "Whatever you're carrying, you don't have to carry it alone."

Something cracked open in his chest. He hadn't realized he'd been waiting for someone to notice he was drowning.

That afternoon, he sat on a bench by the river and watched an orange sun bleed into the water. He thought about Sarah's palm-reading superstition, about the vitamins he took like secular communion wafers, about the way he'd been moving through his own life like a haunting instead of a living thing.

The vitamin dissolved. The bear woke from hibernation. The zombie found its pulse.

He called Sarah that evening and asked if she wanted to get dinner. She said yes, like she'd been waiting.

Some mornings, he still woke at 5:30 AM. But now, when he swallowed his vitamin, he actually tasted it.