The Animals We Keep

The **cable** guy was in my living room again, the third time this month. Sarah had left over the weekend, taking the **dog**—a rescue terrier with abandonment issues—and leaving me with the television I couldn't work and the silence I couldn't fill.

"Your signal's garbage," the technician said, his back to me as he fiddled with wires behind the wall-mounted screen. "You're not getting what you're paying for."

I laughed without humor. Story of my life.

I'd spent the morning by the building's **pool**, watching early swimmers slice through chlorinated water while I scrolled through missed calls from my boss. She wanted me to **bear** bad news to the team—budget cuts, restructuring, the usual euphemisms for dismantling lives. I was good at it. Too good. That was the problem.

My phone buzzed. Sarah. Or maybe just her ghost, still haunting my notifications.

"You got a smart setup here," the cable guy said, finally turning around. Wiping grease on his pant leg. He couldn't have been thirty. Young enough that his whole life stretched ahead of him like an unwritten page. "You work in tech?"

"Finance," I said. "But I'm thinking about quitting."

He nodded, like he heard that every day. Maybe he did. "My cousin's girlfriend did that. Moved to a **fox** farm in Vermont. Helps raise them for their pelts. Says she's happier, though."

I stared at him. "Fox farm?"

"Yeah. Weird, right? But she says there's something honest about it. The animals are what they are. No pretending."

He finished up, gave me a number to call if the signal dropped again. I paid him, watching his van drive away through the window where Sarah's face used to be when she waved goodbye.

Later, I called my boss. I'd bear the bad news tomorrow. But tonight, I sat by the pool alone, watching the water ripple in the wind, thinking about fox farms and honest work and what it means to finally stop pretending to be something you're not.

The cable worked fine. I never turned it on.