Water Wakes the Walking Dead

David stood by the office water cooler, his fedora - a relic from before the merger, before the restructuring, before he stopped caring - pulled low against the fluorescent lights that hummed their corporate lullaby. He wasn't sleeping. He was dead.

Not dead like his father - cancer at fifty-seven, grace and dignity intact. Dead like a **zombie** in an understaffed B-movie: walking, talking, filling out TPS reports, but somewhere along the line, someone had removed his soul and forgotten to file the paperwork.

The hat had been Sarah's idea. "You need a signature," she'd said, pressing the brim upward three years ago, when they still laughed at dinner parties and planned weekends that never materialized. Now it was just camouflage - armor against the inevitable "rough night, David?" comments from coworkers who didn't actually want an answer.

"You look like shit, David."

He jumped, splashing **water** onto his shirt. Sarah stood there, two-day-old coffee stain on her blouse, circles under her eyes that matched his own. They hadn't spoken in two weeks - not since the fight about nothing, the one that ended with him sleeping in the guest room and her silence filling every corner of their life.

"Rough night," he said automatically.

"Bullshit." She filled her own cup. "You've been a zombie for months. I've been a zombie for months. We're both just... wandering around, eating brains - or in our case, eating takeout and watching Netflix until we pass out."

The fluorescent lights flickered. Something cracked in David's chest.

"I don't know how to come back," he whispered. "I don't know where I went."

Sarah set her cup down. She reached up, fingers grazing the brim of his hat - that stupid, ridiculous hat that had become his coffin lid. Then she tipped it back, exposing his face to the awful, honest light.

"Start with water," she said. "Start here. We're both drowning, David. Maybe we can learn to swim together."

His eyes burned. For the first time in months, something felt real. Not good, not fixed - but real.

"I'm tired," he admitted, voice cracking. "I'm so fucking tired of being dead."

"Me too." She took his hand across the counter. "But zombies can be cured, right? Isn't that how those movies end?"

He almost smiled. "Usually with amputation."

"Let's skip the amputation," she said, squeezing his fingers. "I still need you. All of you. Even the parts that think they're gone."

The water cooler hummed its indifferent song. Behind them, phones rang and emails landed and the corporate machine kept grinding. But under the fluorescent lights, holding his wife's hand, David felt something shift inside him - small, terrified, but unquestionably alive.

He didn't know if they'd make it. Didn't know if the dead could really come back. But for the first time in months, he wanted to find out.