The Last Inning of the Living Dead

Marc showed up to work again—another day of shambling through fluorescent-lit corridors, feeling like something that had died three promotions ago. His boss, Gary, loomed over his cubicle like a grizzly bear that had discovered honey in the form of Marc's misplaced error report. Gary's breath smelled of coffee and poor decisions.

"You missed the decimal in cell E7," Gary rumbled, and Marc nodded, his signature already practiced on whatever reprimand form this would require. He'd become a corporate zombie, animated only by direct deposits and the fear of losing his health insurance.

That evening, Marc sat on his balcony with Luna, his elderly Golden Retriever whose muzzle had gone the color of storm clouds. She rested her head on his knee, and he stroked the soft fur behind her ears. The dog was the only living thing that still looked at him with something resembling hope.

He reached for the battered baseball cap hanging on the hook—a relic from his college team, when the world still felt like something he could affect, not something that happened to him. He'd been a pitcher then. The cap smelled like sweat and summers that had ended too soon.

Marc's phone buzzed. Another Slack message from Gary. Something about a meeting at 7 AM tomorrow. The kind of meeting that ended with people carrying boxes to their cars.

Luna whined, sensing the shift in his posture. Marc looked at her, then at the cap, then at the city lights flickering on like artificial stars. Something in him snapped—or maybe, something in him finally woke up.

He typed back: Can't make it. Resigning effective immediately.

His thumb hovered over send. The fear was a physical weight in his chest. But Luna nudged his hand, and he thought about how she'd lived her whole life in a way that made sense—loving completely, sleeping deeply, eating joyfully.

He pressed send.

Then he grabbed his old baseball glove from the closet and walked to the park across the street. It was empty. The field stretched out beneath him, cracked concrete and memories. He stood on the pitcher's mound, the only real thing in a world that had gone fake around him, and threw the ball toward home plate. It landed in the dirt, but the sound was the most honest thing he'd heard in years.

For the first time in a decade, Marc felt like something alive.