Last Call for the Living

The eighth whiskey burned going down, which was good. Pain meant you could still feel something, and God knows feeling anything was preferable to being a corporate zombie—another shell in a suit, shuffling between meetings that could have been emails, living for weekends that disappeared like smoke.

She sat three stools down, framed against the neon sign. Orange hair, sunset-colored in the bar's amber light. She'd been watching him, he realized. Not with interest, but with something like assessment. Like she was solving him.

"You look like a man who's answered the riddle of the sphinx," she said, sliding onto the stool beside him. "And found out the prize was just more questions."

He laughed, surprised. "That specific, huh?"

"I'm good at reading people. Comes with the territory of being too observant for my own good." She signaled the bartender. "Two of whatever he's having. And put them on my tab."

"Generous. Or possibly foolish."

"I'm fox-cunning, not foolish," she grinned. "There's a difference. Foxes survive because they know when to take risks and when to play dead."

"Which one is this?"

"This?" She accepted her glass, clinked it against his. "This is a risk. Sometimes you see someone across the room who looks like they need saving from themselves, and you think: maybe that's exactly where I am too. Maybe we're both sphinxes posing riddles to empty rooms."

Her eyes held him—golden, knowing, strangely hopeful beneath the cynicism.

"What's the riddle?" he asked softly.

"The riddle is: what do you do when you realize you've been living someone else's life?" She tapped her glass against his again, deliberately. "The answer isn't at the bottom of a glass. It's in the company you keep while you figure it out."

Outside, the city's lights blurred through rain-streaked windows. Orange from streetlamps, red from brake lights, a world of people going somewhere or nowhere at all. But for tonight, for this moment, he wasn't dead inside anymore.

"I'm Elena, by the way."

"James."

"Well, James. You want to get out of here? I know a place that serves actual food, and the zombies haven't figured it out yet."

He thought about his apartment, empty and echoing. About tomorrow's meetings, the emails, the endless shuffling.

"Yes," he said. "Absolutely yes."