What Remains at Sunset

The dog, Barnaby, knew before I did. He stopped jumping at the door when Marcus's key turned in the lock, just watched with those wise, liquid eyes as the man who'd once thrown tennis balls for hours shuffled past him without a word. That was the first year.

Tonight, I'm chopping spinach for dinner—the bitterness feels appropriate—when Marcus appears in the kitchen doorway. His orange plaid shirt hangs loose on a frame that's been wasting away for months. The irony isn't lost on me: we worried about zombies in our marathon horror movie nights, imagined the apocalypse, but the real walking dead was already sitting beside us on the couch, losing his nouns one by one until he forgot my name too.

"Sarah," he says sometimes, pointing at me. "The. The. Person."

Not my name. Just my function.

The neurologist calls it semantic dementia. I call it watching someone become a zombie while they're still breathing, still eating, still taking shits that I have to clean up because he forgets how to wipe himself. The spinach sizzles in the pan. Marcus watches like it's a magic trick.

"Green," he says.

"Yes, Marcus. Spinach."

He laughs, that hollow sound that used to be a chuckle that made my chest warm. Now it's just wind through a hollow tree. He reaches for my hand and I let him take it, his palm dry and papery against mine. The夕阳 spills through the window, orange light catching in his thinning hair, turning him golden and ghostly all at once.

Some days I want to run. Leave Barnaby with my sister, book a one-way ticket to somewhere with a name I can't pronounce. But then Marcus looks at me with those confused eyes, and I remember his vows. Not the pretty ones about love—the one about caring. "In sickness," he'd said, "and in goddamn hell."

He added the last part himself. Made everyone laugh. Made me love him more.

The spinach is ready. I scoop it onto two plates, add the chicken that he can chew without choking. We eat in the orange light of dying day, Barnaby at our feet, and I wonder which of us is really the zombie here—him for what his mind has become, or me for what I've let my life become.

"Good," Marcus says, pointing at his plate. "The. Good."

"Yes," I whisper, swallowing around the lump in my throat. "It's good, Marcus. It's good."