Zombie Season

The spinach was stuck between his front teeth when he told her he loved her. That was the moment Maya knew—four years too late—that their marriage had become a zombie, shuffling through the motions of a life it had ceased to truly inhabit years ago.

They were at dinner, that terrible Italian place with the_checkered tablecloths they'd kept visiting out of habit. The sauce on his pasta was that particular shade of orange that reminded her of the sunset they'd watched on their honeymoon in Santorini, back when everything still felt possible. Now it just looked like artificial coloring.

"I love you," Tom said, his eyes not quite meeting hers, always drifting somewhere over her left shoulder. It was his reflex, the way he said it when things felt wrong, like the words themselves could patch the cracks widening between them.

Maya had put down her fork. She'd thought about Sarah, her friend from work who had listened to her describe this exact moment a hundred times without ever telling her to leave. Sarah understood the particular paralysis of loving someone who had already left the relationship emotionally but refused to physically go.

"You have spinach," was all Maya said.

Later, packing her suitcase in the guest room where she'd been sleeping for three months, she found the orange scarf he'd bought her for Christmas last year. The color that used to be vibrant now seemed garish, like a clown's smile painted too wide. She remembered when she'd loved him, really loved him, before the slow death of doing the same things, saying the same words, becoming strangers who shared a bed.

The zombie had to be put down. That's what she'd told herself, standing in their kitchen at midnight, eating cold spinach and feta straight from the container, finally crying the tears she'd been holding back for years.

She left before dawn. The sunrise was bleeding orange across the sky when she climbed into the car, and for the first time in what felt like forever, she felt entirely, devastatingly alive.