Custody of the Goldfish

The divorce mediator had suggested we make a list. Divide everything evenly. Fair and square. That was before we got to the goldfish.

Marcus wanted the baseball card collection—his grandfather's legacy, he'd called it, though I'd never seen the man look at a card in seven years of marriage. I'd wanted the painting from our first trip to Oaxaca, the one with the colors of a bruised sky.

We'd moved through the house like ghosts, placing sticky notes on furniture. Blue for him, pink for me. The swimming trophies from his college days went into his box. My padel racket—his birthday gift to me last year, back when we still pretended to enjoy each other's hobbies—went into mine.

The dog, Barnaby, was never in question. He'd been mine before Marcus, a rescue with anxiety issues and a hatred of thunderstorms. Marcus had never bonded with him anyway. "He's your emotional support animal," Marcus had said during the mediation, like it was an insult. "You can keep him."

But the goldfish—this stupid, twenty-cent carnival prize our niece had won and immediately abandoned—sat in its bowl on the kitchen counter, watching us with its unblinking eye. Neither of us wanted it. Neither of us wanted to be the one who admitted defeat first, who took the fish out of stubbornness or spite.

"I fed it this morning," I said, leaning against the counter. The kitchen felt too large now. We'd painted it yellow together, standing on ladders, drunk on cheap wine and the certainty that we'd grow old here.

Marcus laughed, sharp and tired. "You fed it? That's your argument? You performed the basic maintenance required by a living creature and now you're entitled to it?"

"What's yours? That you stared at it while drinking coffee and contemplating your mortality?"

He was quiet. Then: "We flushed the last one, you know. Before you moved in."

I looked at him. Really looked. The man I'd loved, now compressed into something smaller, meaner. Something that could fit inside a cardboard box.

"Flush it," I said.

"What?"

"The fish. Flush it. We'll split the cost of a new one for the niece when she visits next month."

Marcus stared at me, then at the goldfish, then at the yellow walls that held seven years of secrets. He started to laugh—really laugh, for the first time in months. It sounded like something breaking.

"God," he said, wiping his eyes. "We're terrible people."

"Yeah," I agreed, and realized I meant it. "But at least we're terrible together."

We released the goldfish into the toilet bowl together, standing close enough that our arms brushed. As it swam away into the dark, I thought: maybe that's marriage. Not staying afloat forever, but finding someone willing to hold your hand while you both go down the drain.