Vitamins for the Living Dead

The fluorescent lights hummed their usual headache-inducing frequency as Maya arranged the orange plastic bottles on the conference room table. Her latest pitch: an organic vitamin line for the terminally exhausted. She'd been working on the campaign for three months, ever since her promotion had left her feeling like something hollowed out by forces beyond her control.

Her boss, Gary, shuffled in with his characteristic zombie gait—eyes glazed, skin the color of photocopier paper, tie stained with yesterday's decisions. At 48, he'd given up somewhere around year fifteen of the corporate grind. Maya saw her future in his slumped shoulders, in the way he moved through meetings as if animating his own corpse required more energy than he could muster.

"The target demographic," Maya began, her voice sounding foreign to her own ears, "is professionals aged 25-45 who feel... less than alive."

Her hand went to her hair self-consciously. Stress had been thinning it for months, another surrender etched into her physical form. Sometimes she found strands on her pillow in the morning, fallen soldiers in some invisible war.

Gary nodded absently, already reaching for his third coffee of the morning. The irony wasn't lost on her—selling vitamins to the walking dead while neither of them had seen actual sunlight since the previous fiscal quarter.

Later, walking home through the gentrified streets that felt increasingly like a movie set she hadn't been cast in, Maya paused at the dog park. A golden retriever chased a tennis ball with unbridled joy, its coat gleaming under actual stars. The dog's owner, a man her age, caught her eye and smiled. Something in her chest stirred—some long-dormant recognition of possibility.

"She loves this time of night," he said, and Maya found herself telling him about the vitamin campaign, about the corporate zombies, about the hair falling out and the hours dissolving into nothing. He laughed, really laughed, and she realized she couldn't remember the last time she'd heard genuine joy.

"Maybe," he said, "what people need isn't another vitamin. Maybe they need to remember they're not dead yet."

The words stayed with her as she walked home, past the glowing windows of other people's lives. Inside her apartment, she swept the fallen hair from her bathroom floor, then placed the orange bottles on her kitchen counter. Tomorrow she'd quit. Tomorrow she'd adopt a dog. Tomorrow she'd feel something real. But tonight, she swallowed her vitamins with a glass of water, and for the first time in months, she didn't feel like something pretending to be alive.