What We Feed the Dead

Matt had been dead for three months, though nobody had told his body yet. He sat across from me in the cafeteria, stirring lukewarm coffee with the mechanical patience of a thing that no longer required sleep. Our coworkers didn't notice—the difference between depressed software engineer and office zombie was slim to none.

"You need to get out more," he'd said yesterday, sliding a bottle across my desk. Vitamin D3. The irony wasn't lost on either of us.

The fox appeared on a Tuesday, trotting along the paved path between office buildings like she owned the place. She stopped beneath my window, russet coat bright against the concrete, and scratched behind her ear with casual grace. Then she looked up at me, eyes yellow and ancient, and I felt something wake in my chest that had been dormant since Matt's promotion.

"Did you see her?" I asked later.

Matt blinked slowly. "See what?"

"The fox. She was right there."

"We're downtown, Sarah. There aren't foxes."

But there was. I saw her again the next week, carrying something dead in her jaws—a rat, maybe—and the brutality of it made my hands shake. That was life. Not this fluorescent purgatory where we both moved through motions like marionettes with cut strings.

"I can't do this anymore," I told him Friday evening, as the office emptied around us.

Matt's fingers stilled on his keyboard. "What?"

"This. Pretending we're alive when we're not. You're my oldest friend and I don't know you anymore."

He turned toward me for the first time in months, really turned, and I saw how thin he'd become. How the vitamins hadn't helped. How whatever had died inside him hadn't left room for anything else to grow.

"She was real," he said quietly.

"What?"

"The fox. I saw her this morning. She had a bird in her mouth." He met my eyes. "I think she's trying to tell us something."

Outside, the sun was setting. Somewhere in the gathering dark, a vixen called.