The Last Beautiful Wednesday

The orange sunset bled through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the forty-second floor, casting long shadows across the conference room where Marcus had spent the last seven hours discussing Q3 deliverables. His hair, once thick and dark, now seemed thinner—the physical toll of three mergers and two rounds of layoffs in as many years.

He watched his colleagues, eleven souls trapped in fluorescent-l purgatory, and wondered when exactly they'd all become zombies. Not the flesh-eating kind—that would have been preferable. These were the walking dead of corporate America, eyes glazed from too many Zoom calls and lukewarm coffee, responding to emails at midnight because what else was there?

"You still with us, Marcus?" Sarah asked, tapping her pen against her notebook. Her presence was the one bright spot in this hellscape, the only reason he hadn't packed his desk two years ago. They'd shared a moment once, at the holiday party, both drunk on cheap champagne and existential dread. Nothing had happened, but the memory kept him warm through countless performance reviews.

Marcus dragged his fingers through his hair and sighed. "Just thinking about my savings account. Or lack thereof."

"Bear market," someone muttered from the other end of the table.

"Everything's a bear market lately," Marcus replied, and the group laughed—the hollow laughter of people who'd forgotten how to find joy in anything but schadenfreude and weekend sleep.

The orange on the conference table had sat there since morning. Nobody had touched it. A metaphor for everything they couldn't have, sitting right in front of them, slowly decomposing while they discussed synergy and bandwidth and right-sizing.

Sarah caught his eye. Her look said: *Get me out of here. I mean it this time.*

And Marcus thought: *Yes. Let's be zombies somewhere else. Let's be zombies together.*

The meeting ended at 7:14 PM. They stood up, gathered their things, another day survived. But tomorrow, Marcus decided, tomorrow would be different. He'd eat the orange. He'd tell Sarah he'd been in love with her since that holiday party. He'd quit and open that bookstore he'd been dreaming about since before the bear market, before the zombie life, before he stopped recognizing the person in the mirror.

Baby steps.

He reached across the table and picked up the orange. Its skin was still warm from the sunset. It felt like hope.