We Were Already Dead

The baseball game droned on—ninth inning, two outs, meaningless as everything else. Sarah sat beside me in the bleachers, her newly cut hair brushing against my shoulder. She'd chopped it all off yesterday. Another thing she'd changed without asking me.

"You're staring at it," she said, not looking away from the field.

"It looks nice. You look... different."

"That's the point, Mark." She turned then, and I saw what I'd been pretending not to see for months—the way she'd become a stranger in slow motion. We used to be friends first, back when that meant something. Back before we married and bought a house and carefully arranged our lives into something that looked like happiness but felt like

Zombies.

The word popped into my head, uninvited. Not the movie kind. The real kind—the people who keep going through the motions even after whatever made them alive is gone. That was us. That was everyone we knew, really. You hit thirty-something and the life just drained out of you, replaced by mortgages and dinner parties and the terrible, crushing weight of

Normalcy.

A foul ball sailed into the stands. Someone caught it. The crowd cheered politely.

"Remember when we cared about baseball?" Sarah asked.

"I was never really into it. You were."

"No, we weren't. But we pretended because it was something married couples were supposed to do together." She stood up suddenly. "I can't do this anymore."

"The game? We can leave—"

"No. This. Us. Being zombies." Her voice cracked. "I cut my hair because I wanted to see if I'd feel anything. And I don't, Mark. I don't feel anything."

People were staring. I should have been embarrassed. Instead, I felt something I hadn't felt in years—alive. Terrified, but alive.

"What if we stopped pretending?" I heard myself say. "What if we tried to be friends again? Real ones, not the married kind who don't actually know each other?"

Her eyes found mine, really found them, for the first time in I don't know how long.

"Or what if we admitted we died three years ago and never noticed?" she whispered. "What then?"

The baseball game ended. The crowd stood and dispersed. On the field, the players walked toward the dugout like ghosts. And there we were, sitting in the emptying stadium, finally asking the questions that should have come a decade ago.

I reached for her hand—the first real touch in months. She didn't pull away.

"Then we start over," I said. "Or we end it. But no more pretending."

She squeezed my fingers, just once, and we sat there as the stadium lights dimmed, two corpses deciding whether to stay buried or finally, finally, claw their way back up to the surface.