The Vitamin Pool

Maggie had been a corporate zombie for three years when the fox appeared.

She shuffled through the fluorescent-lit corridors of her pharmaceutical company, her skin the color of copy paper, her eyes glazed from staring at spreadsheets for twelve hours a day. The vitamin D supplements on her desk sat untouched—a cruel irony, considering she manufactured the very things that might make her feel alive again.

Then came Julian, the new VP of Marketing. He was a fox in every sense: sharp features, cunning eyes, a smile that didn't quite reach them. He moved through the office like he owned the air itself, and somehow, he'd decided he wanted Maggie.

"You're too smart for this place," he'd whispered at the holiday party, his breath hot against her ear. "Come to my hotel. We have a pool."

So she found herself at the Marriott at midnight, standing at the edge of the empty pool in her underwear, Julian's expensive shirt draped over her shoulders like a confession. The water was black and still, reflecting the city lights above like fallen stars.

"Jump," he said, already in the water, slick and dangerous. "Or stay a zombie forever."

Maggie thought about the vitamins on her desk, about her mother who'd died at forty-five from stress-related heart failure, about the nothingness her life had become. She thought about Julian's wife and two kids, his reputation for leaving destruction in his wake.

She stripped off his shirt, folded it neatly on the lounge chair, and dove.

The water shocked her system like a defibrillator. She surfaced gasping, alive, thrashing toward the ladder. Julian reached for her, his fingers brushing her ankle.

"Stay," he said.

Maggie pulled herself up and out, dripping and shivering in the night air. She picked up his shirt and threw it into the pool, where it floated like a dead thing.

"I quit," she said to the water, to the fox, to the zombie version of herself still sinking in the deep end.

The next morning, she emptied her desk, pocketed the bottle of vitamins, and walked into the sunlight.