The Aquarium of Dead Things

Marcus watched the goldfish circle its bowl—same route, same desperate infinity—while he knot his tie. The fish, a carnival prize Sheila had won eight months ago, swam through its own existence with the mindless repetition that Marcus now recognized as the fundamental rhythm of unhappiness.

He was thirty-four and felt like a zombie. Not the cinematic kind with brains on the menu, but the office variety: the creature who moved through fluorescent-lit corridors, attended meetings where nothing was decided, and sent emails that no one would read. His mother had called it 'a good job.' Sheila had called it 'until he figured things out.' Sheila had stopped calling three months ago.

The hat sat on his bedside table—a blue Yankees cap, sweat-stained at the brim, belonging to the version of himself who'd stood in Fenway Park with his father's arm around his shoulders. That was the summer baseball had meant something. The summer his father said, 'This right here, this is what matters,' as they watched the Red Sox take a beating they'd laugh about later. His father had died two years ago, and somewhere between the funeral and the mortgage payments, Marcus had become a man who owned a goldfish he couldn't remember to feed and a job he couldn't explain to his own reflection.

'Jesus,' he said to the empty apartment. 'Even the fish has more purpose than I do.'

The goldfish bumped against glass, perpetually surprised by the boundary that contained its world. Marcus dropped his tie on the floor. He called in dead—let them catalogue his absence in whatever spreadsheet HR used for the walking dead.

He drove to the coast, threw the Yankees cap into the Atlantic, and sat in the sand watching waves break against shore in rhythms older than job descriptions. For the first time in years, something inside him stirred. Not alive, not exactly—but perhaps no longer entirely undead.