Vitamins for a Zombie

The vitamins lined his bathroom counter like soldiers—twenty-seven orange bottles, each promising something he'd lost somewhere between the divorce and the third promotion. Joel swallowed them dry, each pill a tiny surrender, then stared at his reflection. The man staring back had the hollowed-out eyes of someone who'd forgotten how to want anything.

At the office, his assistant left a bowl of spinach on his desk. 'Your mom asked me to remind you about iron,' she said, avoiding his eyes. His mother still called weekly with nutritional advice, as if deficiency were the reason her son had become this—this creature who moved through meetings and conference calls like a zombie, animated by obligation rather than life.

'You look like hell,' Sarah told him that night. She was the first person he'd felt anything with in two years, and he was already ruining it. Her palm rested against his cheek, warm and alive. 'When's the last time you actually slept?'

He couldn't remember. That was the problem—the days blurred together, each identical to the last. He was walking through his own life like a ghost haunting his own body.

Sarah traced the lines on his palm, something she'd learned from her grandmother. 'Your life line is strong,' she said softly. 'But your heart line... it's fragmented, Joel. Like you keep breaking your own heart.'

The spinach rotted in his desk drawer. The vitamins accumulated unopened. Sarah stopped calling after he cancelled their fourth date, claiming work, though the truth was he'd forgotten how to be the person she'd liked.

Six months later, he found himself at a grocery store at midnight, staring at fresh spinach. He bought it. He bought vitamins. He stood in his kitchen and cooked, the steam rising like something approximating hope. For the first time in years, he wanted to want something.

The palm reader at the carnival the following weekend told him he was still alive, which was almost funny. But when Sarah called—that number still in his phone—he answered. 'I'm learning to cook,' he said. 'Spinach. It's a start.'

She laughed, and somewhere inside his chest, something stirred. Not much. But something.

The zombies could learn to be hungry again. That was the thing.