The Last Supper

Marcus stood in his apartment kitchen, steam rising from the pot as he stirred the spinach wilting into the garlic-scented olive oil. This was supposed to be their anniversary dinner — the one Elena had requested specifically, before she told him she was leaving him for her boss.

Outside, lightning fractured the August sky, illuminating the takeout menus still magnetted to their refrigerator. He'd kept everything exactly as she'd left it three weeks ago, as if maintaining the shrine might somehow reverse entropy itself.

His phone buzzed on the counter. Another text from his mother: Your father's in the hospital again. He'd been swimming in the ocean when his heart gave out — the stubborn old fool refusing to accept that seventy-five meant accepting limitations.

Marcus dumped the spinach into the colander, watching water spiral down the drain like his own prospects. The cardiac specialist had been blunt: your father needs to decide if he wants to live. But deciding required something his father had never possessed — the ability to imagine endings.

At work the next morning, Marcus sat through another meeting where his department head, a man built like a former linebacker, charged through presentation slides like a bull in a china shop. We need to bear down on Q3 deliverables, he kept saying, his jargon hanging in the fluorescent-lit air like something already dead.

Marcus found himself staring at the man's shoulders, thinking how strange it was that we built whole lives around pretending we'd live forever, accumulating retirement funds and organizational charts and carefully curated spice racks, when any moment could dissolve it all into meaninglessness.

That night, he threw out the wilted spinach. He called his mother and booked a flight home. Some things, he realized, you couldn't fix — but you could still show up for them.