Waking the Zombie

The corporate lobby's plastic palm tree leaned at a grotesque angle, gathering dust like unfulfilled promises. Elena checked her reflection in the glass doors. At twenty-nine, she already felt like a zombie—shuffling through fluorescent corridors, responding to emails at midnight, barely remembering desire.

Her golden retriever, Barnaby, waited in the car. He was the only thing that still felt real.

"You look like you need this," her coworker Sarah had said, pressing a business card into Elena's palm. "Best palm reader in the city."

Elena had laughed. "I don't believe in that stuff."

"Exactly why you need it."

So here she stood outside a strip mall between a nail salon and tax prep service, her dog watching from the Subaru. The sign read: MADAME ZORA—SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE.

Inside, incense hung thick. An older woman with silver hair gestured to the chair opposite her.

"You're carrying something heavy."

"Just work stress."

Zora took her hand, palm against palm, studying the lines. "You've been moving through your days like someone who's already dead. Like a zombie. Present, but not alive."

"Is that what my palm says?"

"Your palm says you're about to wake up." Zora's eyes crinkled. "There's a dog involved. He's going to lead you somewhere you're not looking."

"That's vague. My dog is in the car."

"Then he's already working."

Three mornings later, walking Barnaby before dawn during quarterly reviews, the retriever spotted another dog and pulled with uncharacteristic purpose. The older border collie belonged to a man in running gear who looked equally dragged from sleep.

"Barnaby, no—" she started, but then she saw the stranger's face in the streetlight, and how his dog sat politely despite her animal's enthusiasm, and something cracked open in her chest—something frozen since before the promotion, before the zombie shuffle, before she'd learned that success wasn't the same as being alive.

"Charlie!" the man called, and then to Elena, "I'm so sorry, he never—" Their eyes met and the apology died.

"Dylan," he said. "I feel like I know you."

"You don't." She surprised herself: "But I think you saw Madame Zora too."

His eyebrows rose. "Three years ago. She told me I'd meet someone when I stopped looking."

"Charlie was her dog," he nodded at the border collie. "She gave him to me when she moved. Said he was my good luck charm."

Elena looked down at Barnaby, now on his back exposing his belly like an idiot, completely unselfconscious in his joy.

"My name's Elena," she said, and for the first time in months, she meant it.