Corporate Fauna

The first thing Elena noticed when she walked into Richard's office was the vitamin bottle on his desk—orange-labeled, expensive, the kind you only bought when you started feeling your mortality in your lower back. She'd been sleeping with her boss for six months, and somehow this plastic bottle felt more intimate than anything they'd done in hotel rooms.

"You're going to take the Fox account," Richard said, not looking up from his computer. His wedding band caught the light, a tiny golden truth she'd been ignoring since October.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The Fox acquisition. Marcus was supposed to handle it, but he—" Richard made a vague gesture that could have meant anything. Died. Fucked up. Disappointed me. "Anyway, it's yours now."

Elena stood there, thirty-two years old and suddenly exhausted. She'd spent a decade becoming the kind of woman who didn't get passed over, who didn't let men make decisions for her, yet here she was: handed a promotion she didn't want because she'd spread her legs for the wrong person. The irony would have been funny if it hadn't been so pathetic.

"And Marcus?" she asked.

"Gone."

"Just like that?"

Richard finally looked at her. His eyes were the color of worn-down coins, and she realized she'd never actually seen him before. Not really. "Corporate is a bullfight, Elena. Either you're the matador or you're the meat. Marcus forgot which one he was."

She wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream. Instead, she walked to his desk and picked up the vitamin bottle. Vitamin D3. For bone health. For heart health. For men who spent forty years sitting in chairs, making decisions about other people's lives, until their own bodies started crumbling from the inside.

"Does your wife know you take these?" she asked, surprising herself.

Richard's face went still. The air conditioning hummed. Somewhere in the building, a phone rang unanswered.

"Get out, Elena."

She set the bottle back down, exactly where she'd found it. "I will."

And she did—out of his office, out of the job she'd hated for three years, out of the life she'd been half-living since her divorce. She didn't go back to her desk. She didn't clear her personal files. She walked straight to the elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor, and when the doors opened, she stepped out into the city feeling like she'd just remembered something important about herself.

That evening, she bought her own bottle of vitamins. They were on sale at the drugstore, buy one get one half off, and she stood in the supplement aisle for twenty minutes reading the back of the bottle until her phone buzzed with a text from Richard: don't come in monday.

She deleted it without opening it and drove to the ocean, watching the water darken against the shore as the sun went down, thinking about foxes and bulls and all the things they told each other to make the hunt feel like something other than what it was.