The Last Corporate Shuffle

Marcus stood outside Miller's office, adjusting his fedora—affectation, yes, but one he'd earned after twenty years of swallowing the corporate **bull**shit that passed through these corridors. Inside, the man who'd once called him "son" now stared through him like he was nothing more than office furniture.

"Your position's been eliminated, Marcus."

The words hit him with the force of summer **lightning**—sudden, blinding, illuminating everything and nothing at once. He watched Miller's mouth move, heard phrases about restructuring and fiscal quarters, but his mind was elsewhere.

He was thinking about the **goldfish** bowl on his daughter's dresser, how she'd wept when the little orange body stopped moving, how he'd promised her some things just stopped swimming and that was natural. He'd been feeding her the same lies he fed himself for three decades.

"Marcus? Did you hear me?"

He blinked. Miller was still talking, something about packages and references and professional courtesy. Marcus looked at him—at the man he'd defended in board meetings, covered for during his second wife's miscarriage, the man whose career he'd built with his own bare hands and exhausted weekends.

"You're right," Marcus said, surprising himself. "I have been eliminated."

It came to him then, the thought that had been gnawing at his skull for years: he'd been a **zombie** long before this meeting. Dead on his feet, moving through motions, shambling through quarterly reports and performance reviews while whatever remained of his actual self watched from somewhere far above, screaming silently.

"I mean, I appreciate you saying that—"

"No, you don't." Marcus placed his **hat** back on his head, tilting it at an angle that felt reckless and wonderful. "You really don't." He walked out, past the stunned receptionist, through the maze of cubicles where other dead-eyed souls stared at screens, toward the elevator and whatever came next.

The sun was actually bright when he stepped outside. Marcus took his first real breath in years and wondered what it might feel like to be properly alive again.