The Last Real Thing

The cat was the only one who noticed when Marcus started coming undone. Old, half-blind Barnaby would weave through his legs at 3 AM as Marcus sat on the kitchen floor, back against the refrigerator, staring at his phone as emails piled up like snowdrifts in a blizzard he couldn't outrun.

"You look like shit," Elena said, sliding into the booth across from him. She was the only friend from his old life who still bothered reaching out. "Your hair—" She gestured vaguely at his head. "When's the last time you slept?"

Marcus touched his temple. Gray strands were multiplying, he knew. A topo map of stress mapping itself across his scalp in real-time. "Sleep's for people who aren't managing three doomed projects simultaneously."

"You're going to bear the burden of being the company martyr, is that it?" Elena's sarcasm was gentle, concerned. They'd dated briefly in college, before ambition and geography carved different canyons through their lives.

He was about to deflect with a joke when he saw them across the restaurant—three coworkers from his team, laughing over drinks, animated and alive. Marcus watched himself stand, walk over, say something about tomorrow's deadline. Their faces fell. The conversation died. And suddenly he understood: to them, he'd become something else entirely—the walking dead, a soul-crusher in a button-down, the manager who made them feel hollowed out and used.

A zombie. Not the pop-culture kind hungry for brains, but something worse: hungry for productivity, for metrics, for the kind of relentless forward motion that devoured everything human in its path.

He walked back to the booth and sat down heavily.

"I can't keep doing this, El."

Barnaby was waiting when he got home, purring against his shin. For the first time in months, Marcus turned off his phone. The world kept spinning without him. He lay on the floor and let the cat knead his chest, sharp little claws anchoring him to something finally, painfully real.