Electric Fish

The apartment felt too large without Marcus. Elena stood before the fishbowl on the windowsill, watching the lone goldfish drift through its silent kingdom. They'd bought it together three years ago, a spontaneous purchase from a pet store in Brooklyn. Now it was hers, just like everything else.

Her iPhone buzzed on the counter—a text from her sister asking if she was okay. Elena ignored it. She'd been ignoring texts for three days, since Marcus packed his books and his old fedora hat and walked out without a backward glance. The hat had been his father's, worn at the brim, smelling of tobacco and rain. Seeing it gone still felt like a small amputation.

She swallowed her daily vitamin with tap water, the pill catching in her throat. Her doctor had prescribed them after the miscarriage last autumn. Take care of yourself, he'd said. Marcus had held her hand in the office, his thumb stroking her palm. Now her hands were cold.

The goldfish—she called him Finn, though Marcus had refused to name it—surfaced, mouth opening and closing at the water's surface. She remembered Marcus saying goldfish had three-second memories. If that were true, maybe Finn had already forgotten the way Marcus used to tap the glass. Maybe that was better. Maybe Elena should take vitamins for that kind of forgetting.

Lightning split the sky outside, sudden and violent, illuminating the apartment's bare patches where Marcus's photographs used to hang. Thunder followed, shaking the windows. The goldfish darted downward in panic.

Elena pressed her palm to the glass. "It's okay," she whispered. "Just weather."

Her iPhone lit up again—a call this time. Not her sister. Marcus. She watched it ring, the screen glowing in the dusk, feeling nothing and everything at once. The goldfish returned to the surface, opening its mouth at her reflection in the glass.

When the call went to voicemail, Elena finally understood something about memory and forgetting, about fish and lightning and the way love moves like weather—sudden, devastating, and always, eventually, passing through.