The Bull in the Breakroom

The breakroom hummed with fluorescent-light dread. Sarah stood by the cooler, watching the **water** bubble up through the dispenser's blue plastic throat, thinking about how Thomason had called her 'emotional' in the meeting. That was the thing about being a woman in corporate—you could be competent, driven, sharp as a scalpel, but show one crack in the porcelain and suddenly you were 'emotional.'

The office **bull**—the way they said it, like it was cute, like market trends had anything to do with the animal's actual capacity for violence—had been galloping for three years. Sarah had ridden it. She'd portfolio-managed and synergized and leaned the hell in. Now, at 4:47 PM on a Tuesday, she found herself googling 'corporate whistleblower protections' and 'severance package negotiation' on her phone under the desk.

Her father had always said she was **running** from things. First it was graduate school, then that fiancé everyone liked, then the promotion in Chicago. But she wasn't running anymore. She was standing perfectly still while the world ran away from her—her savings, her fertility window, whatever youthful conviction that she could have it all. The water filled her paper cup,rippling with her own tremulous reflection.

'You okay?' It was Marcus from accounting, holding a sad little tea bag by its string.

Sarah considered lying. Instead she said, 'I think I'm about to do something incredibly stupid.'

Marcus nodded, like this was the most normal thing in the world. 'The good kind or the bad kind?'

'That's the problem,' she said, and the water in her cup shivered with the force of her own impossible laughter. 'I honestly can't tell anymore.'

Outside, the city hummed with millions of people making decisions, running toward things, away from things, while the market kept bulling forward, indifferent as gravity. Sarah drank her water in one long swallow and walked back toward her desk, toward whatever happened next.