Sunday Night's Alright

The corporate elevator smelled like someone had died in it six months ago and nobody bothered to tell the janitorial staff. Elena pressed the button for the forty-third floor, watching the numbers climb like years in a life sentence.

Her phone buzzed. Mark again. He wanted to know if she was coming to dinner, if she was still coming to dinner, why she wasn't answering. She stared at his messages—each one more desperate than the last—and felt nothing. Maybe she'd become a zombie somewhere between the merger and the second round of layoffs. Not the undead kind from movies, but the office kind: bodies walking through meetings, nodding at presentations, signing off on things that would ruin people's lives.

She thought of the dog they'd gotten together, that golden retriever puppy with paws too big for its body. Buster. Mark had wanted the dog so badly. She remembered waking up at 3 AM to take him out, standing in the cold while he sniffed every tree on the block, Mark asleep beside her like it wasn't his responsibility too. That was three years ago. Buster ran away last month. Mark cried for two days. Elena just felt relieved.

The elevator dinged. forty-third floor. Her division.

Sarah Chen was waiting outside the conference room, eyes red and swollen. She grabbed Elena's arm. "They're doing it again. They're eliminating the whole creative department."

Elena should have been shocked. She should have felt something. Instead, she felt like she was watching herself from across the room, some poor actress in a bad TV drama. "That's forty people, Sarah."

"I know. I know." Sarah's voice cracked. "I can't bear it. Not again."

There it was—the word. Bear. To carry, to endure, to survive what shouldn't be survivable. They all bore it. They bore the layoffs, the meetings about synergy, the emails sent at midnight and 4 AM. They bore it like it was normal, like this was what adults signed up for when they decided to stop being children and start being employees.

Elena thought about leaving. She thought about it every Sunday night, standing in her kitchen with a glass of wine, watching the clock tick toward Monday. Sometimes she packed a bag. Sometimes she looked at flights to places she'd never been. She never booked anything.

"Well," she said, straightening her blazer. "Let's go find out if we're zombie or living."

Sarah laughed, wet and broken. "That's not funny."

"No," Elena said, opening the door to the conference room where her fate waited. "It really isn't."

Inside, three men in suits sat around a table. They looked tired too. Elena took her seat and wondered—not for the first time—if the zombies had already won and just forgot to stop moving.

Her phone lit up in her pocket. One last message from Mark: I made your favorite. I'll keep it warm.

She turned it off and opened her notebook. Some days you survived. Some days you didn't. The zombie version of herself would keep going either way.