Three-Word Sentences

Marcus stood frozen in the conference room, watching Harrison dominate the presentation like a **bull** in a china shop—aggressive, clumsy, impossible to look away from. At forty-two, Marcus had mastered the art of appearing interested while his mind wandered to far more pressing matters.

His **dog** Buster would be waiting by the door right now, that desperate, full-bodied wag that greeted him whether he'd been gone ten minutes or ten hours. Buster didn't care about quarterly projections or the polite warfare of corporate emails. Buster just wanted him home.

"We need to hit this out of the park," Harrison was saying, making awkward **baseball** references with his hands. "Play hardball with the suppliers."

Marcus swallowed the **vitamin** supplement he'd dry-swallowed in the hallway—B complex for stress, D for mood, iron for the fatigue that no amount of sleep seemed to fix. His wife Sarah had started leaving them in neat little organizers, each compartment labeled with days of the week, a silent testament to the man he used to be before the layoffs and the restructurings and the slow erosion of everything they'd built together.

He caught his reflection in the glass wall: tired eyes, jaw tightened against things he couldn't say anymore. The office aquarium flickered behind Harrison's head, three **goldfish** swimming endless circles in water that probably hadn't been changed in months. People said goldfish had three-second memories, but he'd read somewhere that was a myth. They remembered. They just kept swimming anyway.

"Marcus? You with us?" Harrison asked.

He looked at the goldfish, then at the man who'd taken his promotion and his corner office.

"I'm here," Marcus said. "I'm always here."

And wasn't that the problem?

The goldfish swam on.