Glass Walls

The goldfish in the lobby aquarium had been swimming the same lazy circles for three years. Or maybe it was different fish. The corporation replaced them when they died, quietly, overnight, so no one would notice the mortality in the building's heart.

Clara watched it from the visitor's chair, waiting for David to sign the divorce papers. Twenty-three years of marriage dissolving into a conference room with view of the parking garage. She thought about Buster, the golden retriever they'd adopted the week after their wedding. The dog who'd slept between them when they fought, who'd licked tears from their cheeks after the miscarriage, who'd had to be put down the same week David's company promoted him to regional VP. The week everything changed.

"I built this," David had said that night, gesturing at their newly renovated kitchen, the pyramid of his career finally reaching its apex. "For us."

But they weren't us anymore. They were payments and schedules and silences that stretched between them like oceans.

The building itself was shaped like a pyramid—a brutalist monument to ambition. Clara had always hated it. Now she hated how she'd let herself become another stone in its foundation, supporting his weight while her own dreams eroded.

The goldfish surfaced, gulping air, then retreated to the bottom of its glass world.

Clara remembered the night David came home and announced they were moving to the city. The promotion. The corner office. The future they were supposed to want. She'd looked at Buster, aging and arthritic on his bed, and realized she was the one who'd have to leave him behind. Not David. Never David. His ambitions always required someone else's sacrifice.

"So that's it?" she'd asked.

"It's everything," he'd said.

She stood up as David exited the conference room, papers in hand. He wouldn't meet her eyes. Behind him, the goldfish continued its endless circuit, trapped in transparent walls, swimming in circles it mistook for progress.