The Sphinx of the Thirty-Second Floor

Maya had been moving through her days like a zombie for three years when the goldfish died. It sat in its bowl on the reception desk of Strauss & Merritt, floating upside down like a grotesque flower, its orange scales catching the afternoon light. No one else noticed. They were all too busy being zombies themselves—shuffling between meetings, eyes glazed from screens, souls eroding by the hour.

The call came from the thirty-second floor. Eleanor Vance, known behind her back as the Sphinx for her inscrutable expressions and impossible questions. Maya took the slow elevator, gathering herself like armor.

"Do you know why I called you up?" Eleanor asked, not looking up from her desk. Her office was all glass and sharp angles, the city sprawling beneath them like something you could crush under a heel.

"The quarterly reports?"

"Those are adequate. I wanted to ask about the fish."

Maya blinked. "The... goldfish?"

"It's been dead for two hours. Nobody's disposed of it. Nobody's even mentioned it." Eleanor finally looked at her, and something in her face cracked—grief, exhaustion, or perhaps just the weight of too many years being impossible to read. "What does that say about us, Maya?"

"That we're broken?"

"That we've forgotten how to notice when something's stopped living."

The silence stretched between them, charged with everything they couldn't say. Maya realized with sudden clarity that she was tired of being a zombie. That her numbness was a choice she made every day, and that the Sphinx wasn't a riddle to be solved but a mirror.

"I'll go flush it," Maya said. "And then I'm putting in my two weeks' notice."

Eleanor's smile was the first genuine thing Maya had ever seen from her. "The riddle was never supposed to be this hard. Take care of the fish, Maya. Then take care of yourself."