The Goldfish's Last Prayer

Maya pressed her palm against the cold office window, watching the rain blur the city lights below. Her cube-mate turned away, the latest casualty of the quarterly purge—another friend reduced to a cardboard box and a security escort.

"You're the sphinx of the 23rd floor," he'd joked last week, when she'd sat silent through yet another all-hands meeting about "synergy" and "optimization." Riddles without answers.

On her desk, a beta fish swam in lazy circles, its crimson scales catching the monitor's glow. She'd rescued it from the breakroom tank three years ago—some corporate wellness initiative about office pets reducing stress. The irony wasn't lost on her.

She opened her desk drawer and stared at the orange prescription bottle. Vitamins, she told herself, though the label had peeled away months ago. In the bathroom mirror, she swallowed two dry.

Her phone buzzed. A message from Ethan: *Dinner?*

They'd been something once, before the divorce, before she poured herself into work that kept demanding more. Before she learned that achievement was just another hollow cage.

The fish rose to the surface, mouth opening and closing in silent supplication. Maya wondered if it remembered the ocean, if such memory existed in its tiny brain. Or if it only knew this glass rectangle, this artificial everything.

She typed back: *Yes.*

Later, over wine that tasted like regret, Ethan reached across the table. "You look tired, Maya."

"I'm fine," she said automatically. The sphinx's answer: everything and nothing.

"You don't have to be fine."

The words cracked something open. For the first time in years, she let herself feel the weight of all the pretending—all the mandatory fun, the performative productivity, the careful curation of a life that looked successful but felt increasingly like living inside someone else's dream.

"I don't know who I am anymore," she whispered. "Outside of all this."

Ethan's hand covered hers. "Then let's find out."

Back at her apartment, she dropped the vitamin bottle in the trash. The fish watched through its glass walls as she turned off her phone, her computer, the constant demands. For tonight, the riddles could wait. The sphinx could sleep.