The Future

Sophie and Jason are a couple in their 30s, both stuck in low‑energy jobs—he working in tech support and she teaching children’s dance—trapped by a sense that their lives have stopped moving forward. In a bid to shake things up, they decide to adopt a cat that is expected to die within six months because of a terminal illness.

At the vet’s office, while Sophie steps away, Jason browses a wall of amateur animal art and ends up buying a drawing of a young girl holding a dog. The back of the drawing carries a poignant note: the girl’s separated parents have written their phone numbers in case the artwork is ever returned.

The vet delivers a sobering update: with proper care, the cat might live up to five more years, but they cannot bring it home for another month while it recovers from surgery. Rather than wait passively, Sophie and Jason choose to spend the intervening period living as freely as possible, fully aware they are signing up for a much longer commitment with the cat than they had planned.

They both quit their jobs. Jason befriends an elderly man who has shared 62 years of marriage with his wife, and the man offers a candid perspective: the early stretch of a long relationship can be difficult to navigate, yet it is also formative.

One afternoon, while Jason is out, Sophie grows bored and calls the number on the back of the drawing, striking up a conversation with Marshall, the girl’s father. She visits him at home under the pretense of hiring him to design a sign for a dance project she’s developing, then returns another day and sleeps with him.

Hesitation and risk push Sophie toward confession, but Jason responds with a surreal power: he freezes time so she cannot continue the conversation. He speaks to the moon about the possibility of living forever in that moment to preserve their bond, yet the moon reveals that only his timeline is paused—everyone and everything else keeps moving forward. In a later vision, he imagines himself manipulating the night tides with the moon overhead, only to wake up on a beach, alone at dawn.

Sophie moves in with Marshall and takes a job as a secretary at the dance studio she once quit. She encounters two friends, now pregnant, and pictures their children growing up and then having children of their own, a stark image of her own life feeling stagnant.

When Jason comes home one day, Sophie lingers outside the door, and he bluntly tells her there is nothing there for her to come back to. The truth they each reveal is sobering: they had both separately tried to adopt the cat, only to learn it had been euthanized because they hadn’t picked it up in time. In the end, Jason invites Sophie to spend a final night together, a quiet, intimate pause before moving forward apart.

Last Updated: November 22, 2025 at 15:57