The Last Orange Sunset

Mara stood on the terrace of her forty-second floor apartment, nursing a whiskey she'd stopped tasting hours ago. Below, the city burned orange—sodium streetlights and sunset warring against the encroaching dark. She'd stayed at the firm seven years, long past the point where her colleagues had started looking at her with that mixture of pity and respect usually reserved for the terminally ill.

"You're being a bull about this," David had said that morning, his voice flat with practiced exhaustion. "The merger's happening. You can keep charging at it, but you'll just get yourself gored."

He was right. She was being a bull—stubborn, proud, increasingly alone. But something in her refused to lie down.

"We're all zombies anyway," she'd replied, not even looking up from her desk. "Dead from the neck up, shuffling through corridors, eating brains and spitting out spreadsheets. At least the bull gets to choose when it stops."

Now, watching the orange light drain from the sky, she understood what David couldn't. What none of them could. The zombie apocalypse wasn't coming. It was already here—thirty floors of brilliant, educated men and women hollowed out by quarterly projections and the hollow promise of partnership, moving through motions they'd long forgotten how to feel.

She set down her glass. The whiskey was gone, but something else was waking up—a hunger she'd suppressed so long she'd forgotten its name. Tomorrow she would walk away. Tomorrow she would feel something real.

But tonight, she let herself stand perfectly still as the last orange bled from the horizon, and for the first time in seven years, she allowed herself to simply breathe.