Bull Market by the Pool

Miranda stood by the apartment complex pool at 2 AM, her stilettos discarded on the concrete, clutching a gin and tonic she'd mixed from whatever her roommate had left in the freezer. The water reflected city lights like liquid mercury, calm and utterly indifferent to the disaster that had been her performance review earlier that day.

Henderson, that bull of a man with his red face and perpetually undone collar, had leaned across his mahogany desk and told her she lacked "killer instinct." She'd wanted to laugh. What she lacked was the ability to transform herself into the kind of person who could sleep at night after eviscerating someone's pension fund for quarterly profit.

She'd spent three years becoming exactly the sort of zombie the corporate world cherished: one who showed up, nodded at meetings, and hollowed out piece by piece until nothing remained but the instinct to survive. Her friends from college had noticed it first—the way she'd stopped calling, stopped caring about anything except her next promotion.

Then she'd seen them.

In the pool, three goldfish moved in lazy circles, survivors of some tenant's abandoned aquarium, now thriving in the chlorinated water like miracles of adaptation. Miranda watched them flash orange and white in the dark water, existing in their own perfect circle, entirely unconcerned with killer instinct or quarterly projections or the hollow feeling in her chest.

"You're not a failure," she whispered to the water, to the fish, to herself. "You're just in the wrong tank."

She set down her glass, stripped off her blazer and the silk blouse that cost more than her first car, and stepped into the pool fully clothed. The water was shockingly cold, waking something inside her that had been asleep longer than she cared to remember. The goldfish darted around her legs, unbothered by this intrusion.

Miranda floated on her back, looking up at the urban sky where only the brightest stars could compete with the light pollution, and finally felt like she could breathe again. Tomorrow she'd quit. Tomorrow she'd figure out who she was before the machine turned her into something else. Tonight, she was just a woman in a pool with three fish who knew exactly who they were.