The Longest Night

The fluorescent lights of the office hummed at a frequency that made David's teeth ache. Forty-seven years old and he'd become what he once mockingly called a zombie — that walking dead corporate creature who inhabited the cubicle farms, draining life from spreadsheets and converting human ambition into quarterly reports.

It was 2 AM when he finally left. The building's automated doors hissed open and he stepped into the parking lot, where his car sat pooled under the sickly orange glow of streetlights. He should go home to Sarah, asleep in their bed. Instead, he drove to the apartment complex where his bachelor brother lived, claiming he needed to discuss their mother's estate. The truth was simpler: he didn't know how to be alive anymore.

The complex's swimming pool glowed with an underwater blue light, casting strange shadows against the fence. David sat on a plastic lounge chair, nursing warm gin from a flask he'd bought months ago and forgotten about.

A cat emerged from the bushes — a mangy calico with one ear shredded from some long-ago fight. It didn't approach him. Instead, it sat at the pool's edge, staring into the water as if searching for something lost. David watched it for twenty minutes.

"You're waiting for something that's not coming back," he told the cat. The animal turned its head, yellow eyes narrowing in what looked like judgment.

David realized then that he'd been the same cat for fifteen years, sitting at the edge of his own life, waiting for the moment when he'd feel like he'd truly started living. The zombie wasn't the creature that died and rose again — it was the one that never died at all, just kept walking.

The cat stood, stretched, and padded away through the fence's gap without looking back. David finished the gin, stood up, and drove home. In bed, Sarah shifted in her sleep and curled into him. For the first time in months, he didn't lie awake pretending to be asleep. He closed his eyes and, for a few hours before dawn, actually rested.