The Last Supper at Olympus Diner

Marcus stood before the bronze **bull** statue in the gallery where he'd worked for twenty years, his severance check burning in his pocket. The beast's frozen charge seemed ridiculous now—all that momentum going nowhere, just like him. At forty-seven, he was being phased out for someone half the cost and half the age.

He drove to the Olympus Diner, the chrome-and-neon temple where he'd first met Sarah. She'd ordered spinach salad that night, picking through the leaves like she was searching for something she'd lost. "You're like a **sphinx**," she'd told him months later, in bed. "All riddles, no answers." She'd left him six months ago, tired of his emotional constipation, his inability to say what needed saying.

The diner's vinyl booth still held the ghosts of their conversations. Marcus ordered the same spinach salad she'd had, the wilted greens looking like fallen dreams on his plate. He ate mechanically, tasting regret and memory and the bitter realization that he'd spent two decades curating other people's art while his own life remained a series of rough drafts, perpetually unfinished.

"You gonna eat those pickled peppers?" The waitress asked, breaking his reverie.

Marcus looked at her—maybe thirty, with knowing eyes and a name tag that said "ROXY." He thought about his empty apartment, the gallery's closing doors, the way Sarah had finally stopped asking questions he wouldn't answer.

"No," he said, pushing the plate away. "But you can have something better." He slid the severance check across the table. "Take it. Go somewhere. Anywhere."

She stared at him, then at the check. "What's the catch?"

"Just don't spend twenty years standing still."

Outside, the sun painted the sky in impossible colors. Marcus didn't know what came next, but for the first time, he was ready to live the question instead of running from it.