The Goldfish in the Corner Office

The goldfish died three weeks before we did.

Marcus kept it in a bowl on his desk—a comet with translucent fins that pulsed like a heartbeat when the afternoon light hit it just so. We'd take turns feeding it flakes during budget reviews, watching its mouth open and close in that perpetual, silent O of need. Neither of us remembered to name it.

"You're my best friend here," he told me one night, our knees touching under the table at the going-away party for someone whose name I'd already forgotten. His hand brushed my thigh, deliberate as a strategy. I didn't move away.

The affair started in conference room B and ended six months later in his apartment, where I discovered he'd been seeing someone else the entire time—a sculptor who worked with bronze and asked too many questions. She was his sphinx. I was just convenient.

I stopped speaking to him after that. The goldfish went unfed.

What I remember most isn't the betrayal. It's the morning I saw the fox in the parking garage—a sleek russet shadow moving between concrete pillars, stopping to watch me with ancient, calculating eyes. It looked like it knew something I didn't. Like it had witnessed worse things than a married director of operations and his mediocre mistress.

"Fish can only remember things for seven seconds," Marcus had joked once, tapping the glass with his pen. "Must be peaceful."

The goldfish was floating at the top when security finally entered his office after he stopped coming to work. His wife had left him. The sculptor had moved to Berlin. He'd sent me a single text: I don't know what I expected.

I deleted it immediately.

Sometimes I still dream about the fox, its tail disappearing behind a pillar, and wake up understanding that some creatures survive by eating what they can catch while others survive by never getting caught at all.

The goldfish didn't get a memorial. Neither did we.