The Art of Decomposing

Marcus dragged himself through the office lobby, another morning of feeling like a member of the walking dead. Three years of this corporate purgatory had stripped away everything that used to make him human. The fluorescent lights hummed their usual funeral dirge as he shuffled toward the elevator, feet heavy with the weight of mounting bills and a marriage that had curdled into something unrecognizable.

He'd started running again—literal sprinting through the park at 5 AM, chest burning, muscles screaming, because physical pain was preferable to the numbness that had settled in his chest like cement. His therapist called it 'disassociation.' Marcus called it survival.

The elevator dinged. He stepped inside, turning to find Sarah from Accounting already there, holding a Tupperware container with what looked like wilted spinach and something that might have been tuna.

"Rough night?" she asked, not really asking. Her eyes were ringed with the same exhaustion he saw in the mirror every morning.

"You know how it is," Marcus said, watching the numbers climb. "David's looking at senior living facilities for his mother. Medicaid won't cover the good ones."

Sarah nodded slowly. They were all decomposing, some just faster than others. She had that sharp, fox-like cleverness in her eyes—the kind that came from surviving years of office politics and systematic gaslighting. Marcus wondered what she'd been before this place stripped her down.

"I heard about the merger," she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Your department's first on the chopping block."

The news hit him like water to the lungs. Not fear—just a dull acceptance. He'd suspected as much. Had been running toward it, really.

"Maybe that's good," Marcus found himself saying. "Maybe some things need to die before they can live again."

Sarah looked at him with those exhausted, intelligent eyes. For a moment, something genuine passed between them—the recognition of two zombies who'd briefly remembered they were once human.

"My grandmother used to say, 'What doesn't kill you comes back wrong,'" she said, half-smiling. "But sometimes wrong is exactly right."

The elevator reached their floor. Marcus stepped out, thinking about running, really running, toward something he hadn't identified yet. For the first time in three years, he felt something other than dead weight in his chest. It wasn't hope exactly. But it was movement.