The Last Living Man in Accounting

Marcus had been moving through his days like a zombie for three years, ever since Elena left. The numbness started as protection and calcified into routine. He woke at 6:30, mechanical coffee, Metro commute, the same elevator that always smelled of someone else's breakfast, his cubicle on the seventh floor where the fluorescent lights hummed a song he'd stopped hearing.

Then Sarah transferred in from London with her impossible questions and that damn cat screensaver. "Why are we still doing this?" she'd ask, staring at spreadsheets that had long ceased to mean anything. She called it bullshit, which it was—months of fabricated projections for a product nobody wanted, managed by a director who charged through meetings like a bull in a china shop, destroying everything and calling it leadership.

"It's a sphinx," Sarah said one evening when they'd both stayed late, both pretending there was work worth doing. She'd taped a riddle to her monitor: *What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?* "The answer isn't man anymore. It's debt."

She'd found a stray cat in the alley below their office. Gray, scarred, surviving on scraps and spite. Sarah named him Riddle because he wouldn't come when called but would watch them with those ancient eyes, asking questions without words.

The corporate zombie routine shattered the night Riddle got sick. Sarah couldn't afford the emergency vet, and Marcus found himself driving them both to an all-night clinic in his father's old Volvo, thinking about how Elena would have laughed at this—two overpaid accountants crying over a street cat they'd known for three weeks.

"You're not dead yet," Sarah said somewhere around 3 AM, waiting for test results in a sterile room that smelled like antiseptic and despair. Her hand found his in the dark. "Even if you feel like it."

Riddle lived. The project got cancelled. Sarah quit to open a bookstore, which was objectively ridiculous and somehow exactly right. Marcus asked for a demotion to a position that paid less but required him to—actually—interact with numbers that meant something. He started waking up curious again.

The sphinx's riddle had changed, he realized. What walks through life half-alive until something reminds it how to bleed? The answer, always, was love. Or maybe just a stray cat with bad kidneys and better timing than any prophet.