The Last Living Man

Marcus sat on the balcony of his tenth-floor apartment, a half-empty bottle of scotch between his knees, watching the palm tree across the street sway in the midnight breeze. Its fronds caught the streetlamp glow like skeletal fingers. He'd been living here three years and never noticed how beautiful—how tragically beautiful—it could be.

Inside, his phone buzzed. Another Slack message from the team in Singapore. He'd stopped caring months ago, somewhere around the time they laid off half his department and asked the survivors to do the work of two people. Now he moved through his days like something animated, not quite living. A corporate zombie in a button-down shirt, tethered to his laptop by that invisible cable of obligation and mortgage payments and the slow erosion of dreams.

He'd met Sarah at a party seven years ago. She'd grabbed his hand without asking, traced the lines on his palm with fingers that smelled of cigarettes and expensive perfume. "You're going to break someone's heart," she'd said. And he had—hers, gradually, piece by piece, with every promotion and missed anniversary and evening spent answering emails instead of really looking at her.

The palm tree's shadow stretched toward him like an invitation.

Marcus stood up, bottle in hand, and walked to the railing. Below, the city sprawled like a circuit board, lit by a million lives he'd never touch. He thought about Sarah's prediction, about the heart he'd broken, about the one he could feel crumbling inside his own chest now, hollowed out by years of becoming something he never meant to be.

"You're going to break someone's heart," she'd said. She just hadn't specified whose.

The cable of his phone charger lay coiled on the balcony floor like a snake, its head plugged into the wall, still tethering him to everything he'd come to hate. Marcus unplugged it, watching the charging light die.

Then he sat back down, watched the palm tree dance in the wind, and for the first time in years, let himself simply breathe.