Drowning in Goldfish

The iphone lay in the puddle on the nightstand, its screen still glowing with her last message. Sarah hadn't meant to throw it—that was the lie she told herself as she watched condensation drip down the wall like sweat, like tears, like the water she'd splashed on his face two hours ago during the fight.

"You're irrelevant," David had said, his voice carefully cruel. "Like that goldfish you kept talking about—what was its name?"

She'd screamed then, something about how the fish had mattered more than he ever would, how it had lived six years while they'd barely managed six months.

Now she sat on the edge of the hotel bed, wearing his tweed hat pulled low over her eyes. The smell of him—sandalwood and stale cigarette smoke—clung to the wool like a second skin. She'd stolen it on her way out, along with his pride and a bottle of whiskey from his minibar.

The bedside lamp cast everything in that sickly orange glow of cheap motels, the kind of places where people go to die or be born or end things properly. Her knuckles were bruised purple from when she'd pounded on his door after he'd locked her out.

"Sarah," he'd said through the wood, tired suddenly. "Please."

She'd stopped pounding. She'd leaned her forehead against the door and listened to him breathing on the other side, imagining him pressed against it too, their ghosts touching through the barrier.

That was three hours ago. Now she peeled an orange she'd taken from the complimentary fruit bowl, her fingers sticky with juice, the citrus sharp and clean in the stale room. She ate piece by piece, letting the acid burn her tongue, watching the goldfish in the lobby aquarium through the crack in her door.

It swam in endless circles, trapped in its little prison, beautiful and doomed and utterly unaware that anything else existed. Just like she'd been.

Sarah threw the hat in the trash, left the iphone charging on the nightstand, and walked out into the rain.