What Still Remains

Margaret smoothed the silver hair that had once been chestnut brown, her fingers trembling just a little. At eighty-two, she'd learned that tremble was the price of survival. Barnaby—her seventeen-year-old tabby—purred loudly from his cushioned spot by the window, his own ginger coat now thinning with age.

"You're quite the zombie yourself, aren't you?" she whispered affectionately to her old companion. "Still here, still demanding breakfast, still loving me even when I'm cross."

The word made her smile. Her grandson had been visiting last weekend, going on about some television show with zombies—creatures that kept moving despite having no business doing so. "Like Grandma's rosebush," he'd said, pointing to the gnarled stump in her garden. "Dad cut it down ten years ago, but it keeps coming back."

That rosebush had been her mother's, planted in 1952. Margaret had watered it through droughts, pruned it after harsh winters, and watched it bloom when everything else in her life seemed to be dying—first her husband, then her sister, then her only son.

Barnaby stirred, stretching his arthritic limbs. Margaret stood slowly, her joints stiff in the morning chill. She walked to the window where the zombie rosebush had pushed forth three new canes that spring, defiant and beautiful.

"We're all just zombies, aren't we?" she said to the cat. "Keeping going because that's what we do. Because somewhere inside, something remembers how to live."

She thought of her mother, whose voice still whispered in her ear during difficult moments. Of her husband Charles, whose kindness still guided her hands when she baked their grandchildren's birthday cakes. Of how love, once planted, proved harder to kill than any rosebush.

Barnaby meowed, demanding his breakfast. Margaret smiled, running her hand through her thinning hair, and moved to fill his bowl. Some things, she decided, were worth being a zombie for.