The Last Call Out

The fox appeared at 3 AM, padding across the frozen parking lot behind the cable company where Mark and I had worked for fifteen years. I was on my fourth cigarette, watching my breath steam into the darkness, waiting for Mark to emerge from his shift.

He came out looking like a zombie—pale skin, eyes glazed, movements jerky and wrong. Ever since the layoffs started, we'd all been running on fumes, but Mark had stopped sleeping entirely. The fox watched us both, amber eyes unblinking.

"I can't do it anymore," Mark said, his voice cracking. "Sarah took the kids. My mother's calling every day, asking when I'll visit. I haven't told her I lost my health insurance."

We'd been friends since college, but somewhere along the way, friendship had become just another obligation. Another cable tethering us to lives we hadn't chosen.

"Remember when we talked about opening that brewery?" he asked suddenly. "In your garage? We had it all mapped out on napkins."

"That was ten years ago, Mark."

"The fox knows," he said, pointing at the animal, which hadn't moved. "Look at him. He's not running from anything. He's not tied to a cable. He just IS."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring of keys—the keys to every server room, every network closet, every piece of equipment in the building. "I'm done being a zombie for people who'd replace me in a week."

"What are you doing?"

"What we should have done a decade ago." He dropped the keys into a storm drain. "Come with me. The fox is waiting."

The animal turned then, padding toward the woods that bordered the industrial park. For a second, I saw it—what we could be. What we were before we let ourselves be tethered. Before we started running away from our lives instead of toward them.

I dropped my cigarette. "My car's at the shop."

"We'll walk."

"In the snow?"

"Like the fox," he said, and for the first time in years, something wild and awake flickered behind his eyes. "We walk like the fox."

We started walking. Behind us, the cable company's sign flickered in the darkness, dying neon marking a graveyard of ambition. Ahead, the fox moved through the trees, a rust-colored ghost leading us toward something else. Something we'd forgotten existed.

I didn't look back.