Vitamin Z

The fluorescent lights hummed their eternal song as Mara sat on the edge of the bathtub, dry-swallowing another vitamin D supplement. Her doctor called it the sunshine pill. She called it her daily reminder that she hadn't seen actual daylight in weeks.

She stripped and lowered herself into the bathtub, not for bathing but for the sensation of swimming without movement. The water rose to her chin, and for a moment, she could pretend she was somewhere else. Not in this apartment. Not in this life that felt borrowed from someone else's discarded wardrobe.

Her phone buzzed on the sink. Work. Always work.

She'd become a corporate zombie, moving through meetings with dead eyes and hollow responses, the living dead in a cardigan. The irony wasn't lost on her—she'd spent her twenties romanticizing burnout culture, wearing exhaustion like designer perfume. Now at forty-three, the bill had come due.

A scratch at the bathroom window made her jump.

There, pressed against the glass on the fire escape, was a fox. Its fur burned copper in the bathroom light, eyes intelligent and wild and completely uninterested in her vitamin deficiencies or quarterly targets. It simply existed, vivid and alive, before slipping away into the night.

Mara climbed out of the tub, water dripping onto cheap linoleum. She caught her reflection in the mirror—gaunt, pale, a woman learning to bear the weight of her own choices.

She'd stopped swimming in actual pools years ago, around the time she stopped doing anything that couldn't be measured in productivity. But tonight, watching the fox's retreating shadow, something cracked open inside her chest.

She dried off slowly, methodically. Tomorrow she'd wake up and take another vitamin. She'd return to her job and her meetings and the slow, steady erosion of herself. But not tonight.

Tonight, she stood naked in her bathroom, wet and shivering, and for the first time in years, she allowed herself to simply be alive—a small, defiant rebellion against the undead existence she'd been living.

The fox was gone. But she was still here. And that, she decided, was something.