Corporate Fishbowl

The presentation had been going for forty minutes when Elena noticed the office goldfish floating at an odd angle. The pyramid scheme masquerading as a corporate strategy chart glowed behind her on the projector screen while her iphone vibrated with texts from Mark: 'We need to talk.' Again.

Outside, lightning fractured the afternoon sky, illuminating the conference room's beige walls with clinical precision. Twenty senior managers stared at Elena as if she held the secrets to their quarterly bonuses, which she supposed, technically, she did.

"The key is vertical integration," she said, gesturing to the pyramid's foundation level where 'Growth Initiatives' sat in bold, reassuring letters. Her voice sounded like someone else's—professional, measured, utterly devoid of the panic she'd been swimming in since discovering Mark's hotel receipts three days ago.

The goldfish, now officially deceased, had been named Success by the administrative assistant who'd stopped caring months ago. Elena wondered if Success had simply given up, or if the corporate oxygen had slowly poisoned him like it poisoned everything else.

"Excuse me," someone said. "Your phone."

Elena glanced down. Another notification: 'I'm at the apartment.' Her heart performed an elaborate series of flips that had nothing to do with the espresso she'd consumed at 3 AM to finish this presentation.

She thought about Mark's voice when he said 'I love you,' how it had started sounding rehearsed sometime around February. She thought about the pyramid on the screen—she, standing at the top, supposedly, while actually drowning somewhere near the bottom. She thought about Success, finally getting some peace at the bottom of his tiny, engineered world.

"You know what?" Elena said, closing her laptop. "None of this matters."

The room went silent. Outside, thunder shook the windows.

"I mean," she continued, "it doesn't ACTUALLY matter. We're all just swimming in increasingly smaller circles until we forget we were ever meant to have oceans."

She walked out, leaving her presentation, her promotion, and her dead phone on the conference table. Mark could wait. The apartment could wait. The rain was starting to fall, and for the first time in years, Elena wanted to feel something real.