Vitamins for the Unliving

The bull statue outside the Merrill Lynch building charged toward nothing, its bronze flanks polished by countless hands seeking luck. Elena stood before it at 8:47 AM, examining her own palm — the life line broken, the heart line crossed. A fortune teller in Chinatown had told her she'd die young. She was thirty-four now and sometimes felt like she already had.

She swallowed her daily handful of vitamins with tepid office water: D for the fluorescent-starved bones, B-complex for energy she never felt, magnesium for the anxiety that woke her at 3 AM. The wellness cabinet in the breakroom was stocked with them, part of the company's new "holistic employee vitality" initiative. Beneath the industrial lighting, Elena watched her colleagues shuffle to their desks, eyes glazed, skin pale, moving through the morning ritual with the hollow determination of the undead.

Her iPhone buzzed. Another message from David: *Can we talk? Please.* She'd been ghosting him for three weeks, since the night he'd said he loved her while she was deleting work emails at midnight. She hadn't known how to respond, so she simply hadn't. Now his messages accumulated like unread notifications in her brain.

"Zombie mode again?" asked Sarah, the only person Elena actually liked here. Sarah was 48, recently divorced, and wore bright scarves to hide the tremor in her hands — a side effect, she claimed, of twenty years in corporate America.

"It's Monday," Elena said. "The zombie mode is the point."

Her phone buzzed again. She stared at it, at the cracked screen she hadn't bothered to replace, at David's name glowing like accusation. What was she waiting for? For something to change? For someone else to make the decision she couldn't?

The vitamins dissolved in her stomach, uselessly bright. Around her, the office drones tapped at keyboards, haunted by the specter of quarterly targets, nourished by coffee and denial. Outside, the bronze bull charged forever toward an invisible enemy, and Elena thought about palm readings and prophesied deaths, about how sometimes you don't die young — sometimes you just stop living somewhere along the way, and no one notices until you're already gone.

She picked up her phone and typed: *Yes. Tonight.*

The screen went dark. For the first time in months, her palm didn't feel like a stranger's.