The Last Padel Match

The fluorescent lights of the office hummed with the same monotonous frequency as Marcus's heartbeat. Forty-seven years old and he felt like a zombie—shuffling through quarterly reports, his eyes glazed over from staring at spreadsheets until the numbers blurred into meaningless patterns. His wife had left him six months ago, citing his emotional unavailability, though he suspected she'd just grown tired of being married to a man who looked like the walking dead.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, Marcus played padel with Richard from HR. It was the only time he felt alive. Richard—cunning as a fox, always angling for the next promotion—would chat about office politics while they smashed the ball against the glass walls. Marcus didn't care about the gossip. He cared about the sweat, the thwack of the ball, the momentary clarity that came with physical exhaustion.

"You hear about Sarah?" Richard asked, wiping his forehead with his shirt. "She's sleeping with the new VP. Classic fox in the henhouse."

Marcus's golden retriever, Buster, was waiting by the door when he got home. The dog was the only creature who seemed genuinely happy to see him anymore—tail wagging, eyes bright with unconditional love that Marcus felt he didn't deserve. He knelt, burying his face in Buster's fur, breathing in the scent of dog and garden dirt and simple loyalty.

That night, he sat on his balcony with a bottle of scotch, watching a fox dart through his backyard garden. It paused, looked at him with knowing amber eyes, then vanished into the darkness. Marcus poured another drink, thinking about how everyone he knew was either a predator or prey, and he'd forgotten which one he was supposed to be.

"You're becoming a zombie," his ex-wife had told him once. "Not the eating-brains kind. The kind that goes through motions without feeling anything."

She was right. But tomorrow, he'd play padel again. And maybe, just maybe, he'd start feeling something real.