The Dead Pool

The office pool had reached forty-seven dollars. Not bad for a Tuesday. Sarah leaned against the copy machine, watching the fluorescent lights flicker like dying stars, and wondered when she'd started betting on which of her colleagues would quit first.

Dave from Accounting was the current favorite. His name was written in dry-erase marker on the break room whiteboard, circled three times. "He's got that zombie look," Marcus whispered, pointing to where Dave sat motionless at his desk. "Eyes open, nothing behind them. Just processing spreadsheets on autopilot."

Sarah swallowed her vitamin D supplement with a grimace. The doctor said she needed more sunlight, but the only UV she got was from the glow of her monitor between the hours of nine and six. She thought about the pool money, about Dave's hollow eyes, about the way her own reflection in the darkened window looked increasingly unfamiliar.

"The internet's down," someone announced. "Comcast cut the wrong cable again."

The collective groan was audible. Work stopped. People stood up, stretched, wandered toward the windows. For the first time in months, Sarah saw her colleagues' faces illuminated by something other than blue light. Real conversation broke out. Marcus told a story about his daughter's graduation. Sarah found herself laughing at something Rajesh said about his disastrous online dating profile.

Then the connection restored.

Heads dropped. Eyes returned to screens. Dave resumed his mechanical typing. The zombie trance reasserted itself, seamless and complete.

Later, Sarah stood in the break room alone. She picked up the marker, crossed out Dave's name, and wrote her own instead. The lightning storm outside cracked the sky open, a flash so bright it turned the whiteboard translucent for a heartbeat, revealing something underneath — layers of erased names, months and years of people who'd placed bets on their own exits and lost, or won, depending on how you looked at it.

She capped the marker. The pool climbed to fifty-three dollars. Sarah returned to her desk, opened her vitamin bottle, and swallowed another pill. Sometimes you needed to be your own remedy.