Last Supper at the Oasis

The ficus in the corner of the conference room was dying — not a palm tree, like the ones in the stock photos of this company's team-building retreats, but a wilting, brown-edged imposter that nobody had bothered to water since the layoffs started.

Elena sat across from me, her salad untouched. The spinach leaves were already wilting in the humidity of the room, or maybe it was just the weight of what we were about to do. She picked at her food, and I watched a small green leaf get caught between her teeth — a detail that made my stomach twist with something between desire and nausea.

"Remember when we hired that motivational speaker?" she said, finally looking up. "The one who said companies are like goldfish? That they only grow as big as their bowl allows?"

"We're in a bowl, alright," I said. "And someone's forgetting to feed us."

She laughed, but it was hollow. We'd been having an affair for six months — since before her promotion, before my wife left, before the second round of buyouts. Now she was my boss's boss, and we were here for what the email had called "an important strategic discussion" but what everyone knew was a preliminary execution.

Outside the window, the corporate pond glinted in the afternoon light. Orange shapes broke the surface — the survivors of some executive's abandoned office aquarium, now swimming in murky company water, growing bloated on algae and indifference.

"I shouldn't have taken the promotion," she said quietly. "We should have —"

"Don't," I cut her off. "Please."

The door opened, and the HR director walked in with her folder. Her face was already arranged in that professional expression of manufactured regret, the one they must teach in some seminar somewhere. Behind her, two security guards waited in the hallway.

Elena reached across the table and pressed her palm against mine. Her hand was cool, her fingers long and familiar. I thought about spinach stuck in teeth and goldfish in corporate ponds and how we'd both forgotten that some things, once said, can never be unsaid.

The security guards stepped forward, and somewhere outside, the goldfish broke the surface again, catching flies that had wandered too close to the water's edge. Swimming, eating, dying — all in a bowl that someone else had built for them.

"Your turn," I whispered, squeezing Elena's hand before pulling away.

She stood up, smoothing her skirt. She didn't look back at me as she walked toward the door, and I knew that this was how it would end: not with screaming or declarations, but with the quiet efficiency of people who had learned, long ago, how to survive in bowls that were never meant to hold them.