Last Call at the Sphinx

The black fedora sat on my desk like a dead thing, a relic from the gala last night where I'd played the part of grieving widow to perfection. Three months after David's funeral, I was still wearing costumes.

"You okay, Sarah?" Mark asked from the doorway. He was one of them now—the workplace zombies who'd survived the layoffs by hollowing themselves out, empty vessels waiting to be filled with whatever corporate mission statement came next. His eyes were glassy, his smile rehearsed.

"Fine," I said. "Just thinking."

Outside my window, a fox picked its way across the parking lot, russet fur bright against the gray asphalt. It moved with purpose, head high, entirely unlike the rest of us shuffling between buildings like the undead. David had loved foxes—loved their wildness, their refusal to be tamed. "They're what we used to be," he'd said during those last chemo-drenched weeks, "before we built cubicles around our souls."

The conference room down the hall had been nicknamed "the Sphinx" after a restructuring meeting where the VP had posed riddles nobody could answer: How do we do more with less? What is the sound of one hand clapping on a quarterly report?

Today they'd gathered there again, another round of sacrificial offerings to the gods of synergy. I could hear them through the ventilation, the murmur of corporate incantations, the language of people who'd forgotten what they'd once dreamed of becoming.

I picked up the hat, weighing it. David had bought it for our anniversary, said it made me look like a film noir heroine. He'd been dead ninety-four days and I was still acting in a movie he'd written.

The fox paused, looked toward my window. For a second, our gazes locked. Then it turned and bolted toward the treeline, toward something wilder than this.

I set the hat in the trash bin. The sphinx could keep her riddles. The zombies could have their meetings. I clocked out at 2:17 PM, walked past the Sphinx without glancing in, and followed the fox's path toward the woods, toward something I hadn't named yet but recognized immediately.