Last Call at The Sphinx

Marcus moved through the Thursday night rush like a man underwater, pouring drinks with mechanical precision. Three months after Elena left, he'd become something else — not quite dead, but certainly no longer alive. A creature of habit and hangovers, shuffling through his shifts with the thousand-yard stare of the walking dead.

"Whiskey. Same as always."

Richard slumped onto his usual stool. The man was a fucking bull — horns sharp, temperament worse, always charging headfirst into walls he refused to see. Another divorced stockbroker drowning himself in premium spirits, convinced his aggressive personality was a virtue rather than a pathology.

Marcus poured. Richard drank. The cycle repeated.

She appeared at ten o'clock, as she did every Thursday. Maya — the sphinx in their midst. Beautiful, unreadable, nursing a single glass of red wine while her eyes dismantled everyone in the room. She asked questions that had no easy answers. "Marcus, do you think anyone ever really knows another person?" Her riddles weren't games — they were scalpels.

Tonight, something different. She reached across the mahogany, fingers brushing his. The contact electric, terrifying.

"You're still breathing, but you stopped living months ago." Her voice soft, knowing. "The question is: what crawls out of that tomb first — the man you were, or the one you'll become?"

Richard snorted at the bar. "Always so dramatic, these artists."

Maya ignored him, held Marcus's gaze. He felt something crack open in his chest, something he'd sealed shut with alcohol and apathy. The zombie wasn't dead after all. Just waiting.

"Last call," he whispered, not meaning the drinks.

"Then choose," she said. "Rot, or rise."

He looked at Richard — at his own future if he stayed this path. Then back at Maya, at her impossible questions and the way she made him feel something again.

Marcus put down the bar rag. "I'm taking a break."

The sphinx smiled. It was the beginning of everything, or perhaps the end. He'd find out tomorrow.