The Last Living Thing in the Room

Marcus had become the office bull by sheer force of personality—loud, demanding, impossible to ignore. But at forty-seven, staring at his reflection in the restroom mirror during yet another midnight deadline, the bull looked more like tired cattle.

"You still here?"

Sarah. His oldest friend in the company, back when she used to have opinions about font choices and took actual lunch breaks. Now she moved through the open-plan office like the rest of them—eyes glazed, smile fixed, responding to emails at 11 PM on Saturdays. The corporate zombies had gotten to her too, somewhere between the third acquisition and the fourth restructuring.

"Just finishing the Anderson pitch," Marcus lied.

She nodded, already scrolling through her phone. "Right. Well. Don't work too hard."

The door clicked shut. Marcus returned to his cubicle, where a single goldfish swam in lazy circles on his desk—Eleanor's birthday gift from last month, before she moved out. "So you don't get lonely," she'd said, which was really just a nice way of saying he was incapable of sustaining relationships with actual humans.

The goldfish, which he'd named Goldman Sachs, stared back with its perpetual expression of mild surprise. It didn't care about Q3 projections. It didn't want anything from him except food and clean water. It was, he realized, the only authentic relationship he had left.

His phone buzzed. An email from Sarah at 12:03 AM: "Quick thought on Anderson—what if we pivot their narrative?"

Marcus watched Goldman Sachs swim to the surface, mouth opening and closing in silent observation. The fish would be dead in six months. Sarah would be dead inside for six years. He'd been charging forward like a bull for two decades, and suddenly he couldn't remember what he was charging toward.

He typed a reply to Sarah: "Get some sleep."

Then he packed his bag, left his keycard on the desk, and walked out into the night, carrying nothing but his coat and a small plastic fishbowl. Goldman Sachs swam on, oblivious to the fact that, for the first time in twenty years, Marcus was choosing something real.