The Betting Pool

The fluorescent lights hummed overhead as I stood by the breakroom window, watching the betting pool spreadsheet grow on Margaret's phone. They were taking odds on who would survive the next round of layoffs. My name sat at the bottom of the list, 50:1 against.

Outside, a stray cat—scrawny, battle-scarred, magnificent—crouched in the parking lot, stalking something invisible in the tall grass. I'd been feeding it for weeks. It never let me touch it, never purred, never pretended to owe me anything. Its independence made my stomach ache with longing.

"You're like that cat," Sarah had told me two nights ago, her voice thick with sleep and accusation. "Always prowling around, never staying put. Never letting anyone in."

She was right, I thought. And she was wrong.

My phone buzzed. Sarah's text: *I can't do this anymore.*

The breakroom door opened. Marcus from accounting stepped inside, grinning, holding up his phone. "Looks like Jenkins is finally getting fired. I just won two hundred bucks."

He poured himself coffee, caught my expression. "What? Don't look at me like that. It's just a pool. It's not like we set the fire."

The cat outside finally made its move—a fluid, impossible arc of muscle and fur. It missed whatever it had been hunting, landed wrong, shook itself off, and vanished into the shadows without looking back.

"You okay, Tom?" Marcus asked. "You look—I don't know. Lost."

I thought about the goldfish bowl on my desk at home, how Sarah had bought it for our anniversary, how the fish swam in endless circles, never realizing it was the same water, same plastic castle, same artificial plants, day after day after day.

"Tom?"

"I'm fine," I said. "Just thinking about my next move."

The betting pool on Margaret's screen showed 47 names. Every single one of them just swimming in circles, pretending not to know they were trapped, while someone kept score.

I walked past Marcus, past the fluorescent hum, toward the exit. The parking lot was empty now, but somewhere out there, a cat was still hunting, still missing, still free.