The Last Severance Package

The cat sat on Elena's desk, licking its paw with calculated indifference. It belonged to Marcus from accounting, who'd brought it in because his ex-wife's new boyfriend was allergic, and wasn't that just like Marcus—making his problems everyone else's.

"It's just until I find a place," Marcus had said three months ago.

Now the cat—named Bear, because Marcus had no originality whatsoever—was practically running the department. It walked across keyboards during Zoom calls. It slept on important documents. It stared judgmentally at anyone who questioned its authority.

Elena watched the cat push a stapler off the edge of her desk. *Clack.*

"That's the third one this week," she said to no one.

The office was falling apart, literally and metaphorically. Half the building didn't have internet because the construction crew outside had severed the main cable that morning. Corporate had sent an email saying they were "working on it" but everyone knew what that meant: nothing, nothing, then eventually nothing again.

"You need to bear with us," the IT guy had told her earlier, using the verb as if it were a favor.

She couldn't bear any of this anymore. Not the failing startup culture, not the forced fun team-building exercises, not the way her boss looked at her like she was a resource to be optimized rather than a person with a mortgage and a slowly dying dream of writing a novel.

"Marcus," she said, standing up. The cat opened one yellow eye.

He didn't turn around. "What?"

"You ever notice how we're all just pretending this place isn't sinking?"

He laughed, short and sharp. "Every day."

"And yet we keep showing up."

"The bear eats first," Marcus said, finally looking at her. "That's how it works. The people at the top feast, and we're just—"

"Scraps?"

"Hoping we don't get eaten."

Elena thought about the severed cable outside. Thought about how easily things break. How easily things end.

"Your cat just pushed my coffee cup toward the edge," she said.

Marcus turned. The cat, Bear, was indeed positioning a ceramic mug with terrifying precision.

"Bear," Marcus said sharply.

The cat paused, flicked its tail, and deliberately knocked the cup over. Coffee pooled across important paperwork.

Marcus stared. Then he started laughing. Not the short laugh from before, but something deeper, something that sounded like relief.

"You know what?" he said. "I think he's trying to tell us something."

Elena looked at the mess, at the cat now licking spilled coffee from the desk, at the pulsing disconnected Wi-Fi icon on her screen.

"Yeah," she said. "I think he is."

She packed her bag. Marcus packed his. They left the cat there—let HR figure it out.

Outside, the construction crew was still arguing over the severed cable. The sun was actually shining for once. Elena didn't know where she was going, but for the first time in three years, she was actually leaving.

Now that was a start.