The Last Good Thing

The fluorescent lights hummed their familiar headache-inducing song as Sarah stared at the quarterly report. Another day, another spreadsheet, another slide into the comfortable numbness she'd perfected over thirty-seven years. She was what her therapist called a functional depressive—what she called a grown-ass woman with a mortgage and a slowly calcifying soul.

Her father's watch, its case engraved with a bear he'd hunted in Alaska when he was still the man she admired, ticked against her wrist. It was the last thing he'd given her before the cancer finished what the liquor started. She'd sold everything else after the funeral—his tools, his truck, his pride—but the bear on the watch face remained, a silent witness to her inheritance of stubbornness and the wrong kind of strength.

"Sarah, we need to resurrect the Q3 zombie," said Dave from the doorway, not meeting her eyes. "Management thinks there's still blood in that stone."

The zombie project—doomed from conception, killed twice already, yet somehow always clawing its way back from the graveyard of bad ideas. Like her marriage. Like her hope that she'd ever write the novel she'd been carrying since graduate school.

"I'll get right on that," she said, hearing the flatness in her voice. The corporate zombie she'd become, efficient and dead inside.

Her phone buzzed. A photo from her sister: Mom, eight years gone, standing in their childhood kitchen, peeling an orange. The memory hit her like physical pain—the sharp scent of citrus, her mother's weathered hands expertly stripping the rind, the way she'd always save the first segment for Sarah. The orange had been Mom's love language when words failed, which was often.

Sarah drove home through gray rain, automatic pilot engaged. Her apartment waited, dim and quiet, the only living thing inside waiting for her with the judgment only cats can properly convey.

Barnaby—a fat orange tabby who'd appeared on her fire escape during the lowest week of her life, who'd refused to leave, who'd somehow become the last thread connecting her to something like purpose—rubbed against her legs, purring like a small engine.

"You're the only thing I got right," she whispered, scooping him up. His warmth against her chest was the first real thing she'd felt all day.

She opened a bottle of wine, considered the zombie report due tomorrow, considered the novel three chapters deep in a folder she hadn't opened in six months, considered the bear on her father's watch and the orange in her mother's hands and all the good things she'd survived by becoming someone else entirely.

Barnaby kneaded her chest, sharp claws through her blouse. The small pain anchored her.

"Okay," she said to the empty room. "Not tomorrow. But soon."

The cat settled into her lap, already asleep. Sarah closed her eyes and for the first time in years, let herself remember what it felt like to be alive.