What the Zombie Remembered

The papaya sat on the counter, ripe and threatening to burst, much like Elena's marriage had three months ago. She sliced through the fruit's orange flesh, thinking about how Richard used to say she moved through their final years together like a zombie—present, breathing, but somehow not entirely alive.

"You're chopping spinach again," her mother observed from the kitchen table. "You always cook spinach when you're avoiding something."

Elena didn't respond. She was thinking about the night Richard left, how he'd stood in their hotel room in Cancún, silhouetted against the balcony doors with palm fronds swaying behind him like skeletal fingers. He'd told her she was like the sphinx—impossible to read, full of secrets she refused to share.

"I'm not avoiding anything," Elena said finally, dropping spinach into the pan. "I'm just making dinner."

Her mother's laughter was dry. "You've been making dinner every night since he walked out. Cooking like your life depends on it. Meanwhile, you're aging ten years every week."

Elena looked at her hands—the way her palms had begun to crease, how the veins showed more prominently now. Richard used to trace those lines with his thumb, claiming they told stories she refused to acknowledge. He was right about the zombie part, at least. She'd been sleepwalking through her own existence for years, her emotions buried under layers of compromise and quiet resentment.

"He wanted me to be someone I'm not," Elena said, watching the spinach wilt. "He wanted answers I didn't have."

"Maybe he just wanted you to want something." Her mother stood, walked to the counter, and sliced herself a piece of papaya. "Even sphinxes have desires, Elena. The problem wasn't that you were mysterious. It was that you were empty."

The words struck harder than Richard's departure. Elena turned off the stove, the kitchen suddenly silent except for the refrigerator's low hum. Outside, the palm trees in her yard cast long shadows across the lawn. She realized then that her mother was right—she'd been protecting nothing, guarding no great mystery. She'd simply forgotten how to want.

That night, for the first time in months, Elena didn't cook dinner. Instead, she sat in the dark and ate the remaining papaya with her hands, letting the juice run down her wrists, feeling messy and alive and entirely unlike a zombie.