The Last Good Hair Day

Elena ran her fingers through her hair and counted the strands. Seventeen this morning. Each one a tiny resignation letter from her body. At 32, she'd already lost more than her youth to the corporate machine at Mercer & Ross.

The irony wasn't lost on her. She worked in intelligence gathering—corporate espionage, they called it. A fancy title for what amounted to being a glorified spy, digging through competitors' trash and LinkedIn profiles. Her friend Marcus from the analytics department had called it 'strategic foresight' over drinks last Friday, before his hand lingered too long on her knee.

Now, stepping into her apartment at 2 AM after another fourteen-hour day, she felt like a zombie. Not the pop-culture kind that craved brains—she couldn't remember the last time she'd hungered for anything—but the walking dead variety, hollowed out by fluorescent lights and quarterly projections.

A movement in the alley caught her eye. The stray cat, a ragged calico with one ear, sat on her fire escape watching her with judgment in its yellow eyes. Elena had started feeding it three weeks ago, though she'd never admit to liking the thing. That would require forming an attachment, and attachments were liabilities in her line of work.

She dumped the remaining half of her takeout into the cat's bowl. The cat ate without gratitude.

"You know what he told me today?" she whispered to the cat. "Marcus said my hair looked thinner. Like I hadn't noticed. Like that's the thing that should matter."

The cat kept eating.

Her phone buzzed. A message from Marcus: 'Can we talk about the Anderson account? Tomorrow? Just us.'

Elena deleted it. She knew what that meant. The same thing it meant when his emails to corporate oversight started copying her on everything, when he began taking credit for her intel in meetings while subtly undermining her methodology. He wasn't her friend. He was positioning himself.

She'd seen it before. The way people at Mercer & Ross consumed each other, hollowed themselves out until they became functional zombies, too numb to notice they were betraying the very people they once called friends.

Elena went to the bathroom and brushed her hair. Twenty-three strands came loose. She placed them carefully on the counter, arranged them like evidence, then swept them into the trash. Tomorrow she would forward Marcus's emails to the director of compliance. It wasn't loyalty that drove her—she'd lost that somewhere along the way—but the principle of the thing. If she was going to be a zombie, she'd at least be one with standards.

The cat meowed outside her window, demanding more. Elena smiled. Some things, at least, still had appetite.