Swimming in Glass

The hat sat on his desk like a dead thing—a fedora, ridiculous and hopeful, bought during that brief month he'd thought he could become someone else. Now it gathered dust next to his monitor, next to the goldfish bowl where Bubble stared at him with those perpetually surprised eyes.

Marcus was thirty-four and felt like a zombie—not the pop-culture kind that craved brains, but the corporate kind that'd forgotten how to want anything at all. He showed up, he coded, he went home. Repeat.

"You still wearing that wedding ring?" Jenna asked from the neighboring cubicle. She was twenty-two, beautiful in that way that made your chest ache, and she kept a baseball on her desk for stress relief. Sometimes he'd hear her thowing it against the wall when she thought no one was listening.

"Habit," Marcus said, touching the gold band. Sarah had been gone two years now. The divorce was final, the apartment emptied out, but the ring stayed.

The cable guy came at 4 PM. Marcus watched him work, twisting and connecting, restoring the connection that let Marcus zone out to Netflix for six hours every evening. The guy was young, maybe twenty, with tattoos climbing his neck and eyes that said he'd already seen too much.

"You ever feel like a goldfish?" the guy asked suddenly, gesturing to the bowl. "Swimming in circles, forgetting everything every five minutes, thinking you're going somewhere but you're just—"

He made a circular motion with his hand. "Nowhere."

Marcus laughed, bitter and surprised. "Every day."

That night, he put on the fedora. It felt alien and ridiculous and he looked like an idiot in the mirror. But for the first time in two years, he didn't feel dead. He called Jenna. Asked if she wanted to catch a baseball game.

"About time," she said. "I thought you'd never ask."

Bubble swam to the front of his bowl, mouth opening and closing in silent applause. Marcus turned off the cable, left the ring on the desk, and walked out into a world that was still waiting, somewhere beyond the glass.