The Glass Pyramid

The corporate pyramid rose forty stories above Chicago, its glass skin reflecting a sky the color of a bruised peach. Elena pressed her forehead against the forty-second floor window, watching her breath fog the glass. Inside, the zombies shuffled between cubicles, their heels clicking out a rhythm that matched the fluorescent lights' hum.

"You look like you've been dead for three days," Marcus said, appearing beside her with two coffees. His tie was undone — a small rebellion.

"Goldfish memory," Elena murmured, accepting the cup. "I keep forgetting why I come here. Then I remember the mortgage, and suddenly I'm back at my desk, typing things no one will ever read."

Marcus laughed, dark and sudden. "We're all just swimming in bowls. Thinking we're going somewhere when we're just going in circles."

In the breakroom, Elena's goldfish — rescued from a clearance bin, named Existential Dread — swam endless laps in its too-small bowl. It was the only thing in the office that didn't pretend to be something it wasn't.

The orange post-it note on her monitor had faded from sunset to soft peach over eight months. It said: *REMEMBER WHY YOU STARTED.* She couldn't remember why she'd written it. Couldn't remember if there had been a why.

"My division got axed," Marcus said, the words like glass breaking. "Forty people. They told us at 4:59 on a Friday."

Elena turned. The zombies moved past them, heads bent, phones glowing like small galaxies in the dim hall.

"What will you do?" she asked.

"I don't know." His hand found hers, his palm warm and calloused. "But I'm thinking about opening a bar. Something with actual light. Something where people are alive on purpose."

The goldfish rose to the surface of its bowl, mouth opening and closing, silent and endless.

Elena looked at the orange post-it, at Marcus, at the pyramid that held them both. "Take me with you," she said.

Outside, the sky had darkened to proper orange — the kind that meant sunset, not corporate sunset. The kind that meant endings that were also beginnings.