The Goldfish at the Bottom of the Pool

She'd become something else in the three months since Marcus left—a creature that moved through her life on terrible, automatic instinct. A **zombie** in the most literal sense: the walking dead, animated by nothing but the momentum of existence. Her body showed up to work. Her hands typed emails. Her mouth shaped words like "synergy" and "Q3 deliverables." But inside? Inside was just static.

The worst part was the **hair**. It kept growing—this glossy, chestnut curtain that fell past her shoulders, healthy and alive while she felt so hollow. Marcus had always loved her hair. Had run his fingers through it while they lay in his bed on Sunday mornings, talking about the future they'd never have. Now it felt like a stranger's accessory. Something she couldn't quite bring herself to cut.

The office building had an indoor **pool** in the basement—some corporate wellness initiative that nobody used. At 2 AM, unable to sleep, she found herself standing at its edge, the water still and black beneath the emergency lights. She'd come down here to think, to exist somewhere that wasn't her empty apartment or her gray-walled cubicle.

That's when she saw it: the **goldfish**, floating near the surface. Tiny, unmistakable, impossibly out of place in the chlorinated depths. Someone's joke? An escapee from the reception desk's aquarium? It flicked its tail once, suspended in the alien water like a bit of fallen sun.

She reached in—her sleeve soaking, the water shocking against her skin—and cupped it in both hands. The fish pulsed against her palms, so fragile it could have been a hallucination. She carried it to the emergency exit, barefoot on concrete, and pushed through into the alley where the rain was falling hard.

"What are we doing?" she whispered, and for the first time in three months, something cracked open inside her chest. Not everything. Not enough. But something.

The goldfish swam away when she released it into a puddle, toward the storm drain and whatever came next.

She went back inside and found the box cutter in the supply closet. When the morning shift arrived, they found chunks of chestnut hair scattered across the carpet beside the empty pool like fallen leaves. She was already gone.