The Office Pool

The betting pool sat on Maya's desk, a spreadsheet printed and taped to her monitor: $20 buy-in, winner takes all, guessing who would be first to crack under the new restructuring. Forty-seven names in the column. Hers wasn't among them.

She moved through the office like a zombie lately—that hollowed-out feeling of performing the motions of being a person while something essential had departed. Her ex-husband's departure six months ago had taken her capacity for surprise with him. The spreadsheets, the urgent emails, the quarterly projections—all of it had become a strange theater she watched herself participate in from a distance.

"You in, Maya?" Greg from Accounting leaned against her cubicle wall, gesturing to the pool with his coffee cup. "Two spots left."

She should say no. Should say something about how this was exactly what was wrong with everything, this wagering on human collapse. But instead she heard herself say, "Sure. Put me down for Jennifer from Legal."

Greg nodded, satisfied. "Smart. She's been crying in the stairwell."

That night, unable to sleep, Maya found herself at the apartment complex pool at 2 AM. The water was still, reflecting a slice of moon. She sat on the edge, feet dangling in, and that's when she saw it—a cat, orange and skeletal, perched on the fence like it was waiting for something.

"Hey," she said softly.

The cat regarded her with ancient yellow eyes, then leaped down and approached without hesitation. It rubbed its head against her shin, purred like a small motor.

Maya cried. Not the careful crying she did in her car after meetings, but the messy kind—the kind that had been building for months.

The cat stayed until dawn, when Maya finally went inside. She called in sick for the first time in three years.

At work the next day, the pool was still there. Jennifer from Legal was still the favorite to crack. But Maya walked to Greg's desk, peeled off her twenty, and said, "Take me out."

"Why?" Greg asked. "She's totally going to snap."

"I know," Maya said. "That's why I'm rooting for her."

That evening, she bought cat food. Some things, she decided, were not meant to be predicted.