Zombie Hearts

Mara caught her own reflection in the bathroom mirror at 2 AM. Dead eyes. The kind that belonged to someone who'd been running on autopilot for years, a participant in her own life only in the biological sense. Her phone glowed with Instagram perfection—friends posting about their perfect marriages, their perfect children, their perfect orange groves in California. Mark lay passed out beside her—the scent of whiskey on his breath, familiar as old furniture, comfortable as decay.

The bull they'd bought last month was supposed to be their fresh start. Mark had been sober for three weeks then, talking about building something real, about learning to be present. But the purchase had only deepened the financial hole his drinking had dug. Tomorrow, he'd probably sell it at a loss. It didn't matter anymore. Nothing they owned mattered anymore.

Morning broke with coffee and an orange, its color too bright for this house. Their dog, Bodhi, greeted her with a tail-wagging enthusiasm that made something constrict in her chest. When had she become the kind of person who couldn't return her dog's joy? When had she started treating affection like an obligation?

At the office, she spent six hours preparing documents for a corporate merger. The work used to mean something. Now it was just zombie motion—limbs moving through the day while her mind checked out years ago. She remembered her running club, back when she still ran. Back when she still felt anything at all. That had ended around the time Mark's "rough patches" became permanent.

A memory surfaced: the night he'd toasted to "better days" while staring through her, seeing only his own reflection in her eyes. Three years of emotional coma. She'd been the zombie, not him. Living while dead, moving while hollow, a perfect performance of a wife who no longer existed.

She drove home, Mark's voice on the phone shouting about the bull's price, about betrayal, about how she'd promised. The words blurred into static, meaningless syllables from a meaningless man. She pulled into the driveway, packed a bag with surgical precision. Clothes, laptop, running shoes, Bodhi's things.

The note she left was three sentences. She didn't owe him more.

Orange sunset bled across the horizon as she pointed toward the highway, toward anything that wasn't this. Bodhi rested his head on her lap, sensing the shift, his brown eyes full of the devotion she'd forgotten how to feel. She wasn't just leaving a man who'd been absent for three years—she was exhuming herself from a living death, digging herself out of the grave she'd lain in so long it had become comfortable.

The bull could be Mark's problem now. For the first time since that toast, her heart pumped something real.