The Goldfish on the Windowsill

Elena adjusted her felt hat, the brim casting a shadow across her eyes as she stood in the doorway of her now-empty office. Twenty years of condensed files, half-empty coffee mugs, and the small plastic pond containing two goldfish—one orange, one speckled black—still swishing in lazy circles on her windowsill.

"You can't take them," Marcus said from behind her, already sitting at her former desk. His tie was loose, spinach stuck between his teeth from lunch, smelling of corporate ambition and cheap cologne. "Policy. Pets stay with the office."

She'd trained Marcus. He'd been her intern three years ago, hungry and eager. Now he was thirty-two, her replacement, while at forty-five, she was being phased out—too expensive, too set in her ways, too "not the future of the company."

"They're not pets," Elena said. "They're witnesses."

Marcus laughed, a short sharp sound. "To what? You processing forms for two decades?"

"To everything." She stepped forward, watching the goldfish dart. "The time you cried at your desk when your mother died. The merger that everyone said would save us. The day you came in drunk and I covered for you."

Marcus's face fell. He picked at the spinach in his teeth with his tongue.

Elena reached into the bowl, fingers plunging into cool water, and scooped out the orange goldfish. It flailed in her palm, gills pulsing. Then the black one. She dropped them into a mason jar filled with water she'd brought from home.

"Security will escort you out," Marcus said, not meeting her eyes.

"I know the way." She cradled the jar against her chest. Outside, it was raining, gray and endless. She'd forgotten her umbrella. Her hat would be ruined.

Walking to her car, she watched the goldfish swirl in the jar, their small lives compressed into glass, swimming nowhere, going nowhere, alive despite it all. She got in, started the engine, and began to drive—away from the building, away from the city, toward somewhere she'd decide on later.

The goldfish would need a larger tank. She would buy them a pond. Something with room to grow.