The Things We Feed

Marcus stood by the floor-to-ceiling window of his corner office, watching the fox dart through the alley below—a flash of rust against gray concrete. Up here, he had the view. Down there, things actually lived.

He adjusted his hat, the one Elena had bought him in Milan last Christmas, back when they still remembered to be tender with each other. Now, the apartment was just a place where two ghosts passed in hallway silence, both pretending not to notice they were haunting their own life.

"You've become a zombie, you know," she'd told him two nights ago, her voice soft with that terrible clarity that comes right before someone stops caring. "You come home and your body's there, but everything else..." She'd trailed off. Marcus had nodded, poured another drink, let the confession die without burial.

His phone buzzed—another bullshit crisis from the new VP, some twenty-six-year-old with an MBA and a talent for rebranding failure as innovation. Marcus was supposed to mentor him. Instead, he watched the kid weaponize incompetence and get promoted for it.

The fox paused below, sniffing at something in the dumpster. Then it moved on, efficient and unburdened.

"Marcus?"

He turned. Elena stood in the doorway, backlit by the fluorescent corridor. She wasn't wearing her ring. He hadn't noticed until now.

"I'm not coming back," she said. "I'm done feeding at the trough and pretending it's sustenance."

He wanted to tell her he was hungry too. That his hunger was why he'd stayed in this job, this marriage, this life that had somehow built itself around him like a cage he couldn't quite remember entering.

Instead, he straightened his hat, the way his father had taught him to face difficult things: composed, fortified, entirely alone.

"I know," he said.

The fox was gone when he looked again. Just the alley, and the rain starting to fall.