The Last Good Vitamin

Elena hadn't felt like herself since the merger. Not since Tom—that slick fox of a consultant—had slid into their department with his PowerPoint presentations and his reassurances about 'synergy' and 'streamlining.' Now she sat in her car during lunch, the air conditioning humming against the August heat, staring at the orange plastic bottle in her palm.

Vitamin D. The last good one. Everything else had been discontinued or reformulated or simply vanished from the pharmacy shelves, along with the sleep aids and the anxiety medication and everything else that had made the endless days bearable.

A cat jumped onto the hood of her car—a ginger stray that had been haunting the office parking lot for months. It blinked at her through the windshield, then settled into a loaf, tail tucked neatly around its paws. Elena didn't shoo it away. In another life, she would have worried about scratches. In this one, she envied its ability to simply exist.

Her phone buzzed. Tom. Again.

'Quick sync on the Q3 deliverables?'

She watched the message fade. The joke around the office was that they were all zombies now—shuffling through their tasks, eyes glazed, surviving on caffeine and spite. But zombies didn't feel this hollow. Zombies didn't remember what it was like to care about their work, or their marriages, or anything beyond the next clocked-in hour.

The cat on her hood lifted its head, ears swiveling toward something she couldn't hear. Then it stood, stretched, and leapt gracefully to the pavement, disappearing into the landscaping.

Elena opened the vitamin bottle. The last pill rolled into her hand—small, oval, impossibly fragile against the backdrop of everything she'd lost. She thought about Tom with his predatory grin and his endless questions, about the apartment she barely recognized anymore, about the version of herself who had once believed things would get better.

She swallowed the vitamin dry.

Then she started the car, backed out of the parking space, and drove toward the highway, not checking her messages, not looking back at the office tower rising gray and brutal against the sky. Somewhere ahead, the ginger cat was moving through the tall grass, wild and unconcerned with deliverables or synergy or the things people lost when they forgot how to be alive.