The Goldfish on the Windowsill

Maya traced the crease in her palm, that lifeline growing shorter with every quarter-life crisis email from corporate. The office goldfish — a rescue from some abandoned cubicle — swam in endless circles in its bowl on the windowsill, oblivious to restructuring.

"They're letting me go," Sarah said, not looking up from her box. Her hair, always that particular shade of expensive blonde she maintained between performance reviews, fell forward like a curtain.

Maya had known. Everyone had known. The way Sarah stopped speaking in meetings, the way her desk accumulated personal items incrementally — a plant, then a framed photo, then the goldfish nobody wanted.

"You could have told me."

"What would you have done?" Sarah's voice cracked. "We're not friends, Maya. We're work friends. There's a difference."

The truth settled between them like dust on abandoned monitors. Three years of happy hours and emergency coffees, but they'd never crossed the threshold into real friendship. They'd kept the goldfish at arm's length.

"Take the fish," Maya said.

"What?"

"The goldfish. You brought it here. Take it."

Sarah looked at the fish, then at Maya, and something softened in her expression. "You keep it. You're staying. You'll remember me."

"I'll rename it Restructuring," Maya said, and Sarah laughed — really laughed, for the first time in months.

The goldfish swam on, indifferent to human departures, and Maya pressed her palm flat against the glass as the elevator doors carried Sarah away, taking all that expensive blonde hair and the scent of vanilla perfume and the ghost of something that had almost, almost been friendship.