Electric Fish

The goldfish circled his bowl, orange scales catching the last gray light of evening. Marcus watched it the way he used to watch Elena's iPhone screen when she'd leave it face up on the nightstand, lit up with messages from someone else. Some fish, some phones, you're not supposed to tap the glass.

The storm outside had been building for hours. Lightning cracked the sky in half, sudden and violent, like the night she'd told him she couldn't do this anymore — couldn't do them, couldn't do the apartment, couldn't do the careful way they'd arranged their lives like museum pieces behind glass.

He'd bought the goldfish three days after she left. The pet store clerk said they had three-second memories. Marcus liked that. A fish could swim past the same plastic castle, same neon gravel, same goddamn oxygen bubbles, and experience it as new every time. No haunting. No repetition. Just endless discovery.

His phone buzzed in his palm. Her name on the screen, three years later. The lightning flashed again, illuminating the dust motes floating in the space where her books used to be.

"Marcus?" Her voice through the speaker, tinny and compressed. "I saw you're still at the old place."

"Still here."

"I'm getting married. In September."

The goldfish broke the surface, gasping. Marcus watched its mouth open and close, opening and closing.

"Congratulations," he said. "That's — that's really good, Elena."

"I don't know why I'm calling. I guess I just wanted — I don't know what I wanted."

Outside, the sky went white. For three seconds, everything was illuminated — the water stains on the ceiling, the unwashed coffee mug, his own hollowed-out face reflected in the fish bowl. Then darkness.

The fish kept swimming. It would keep swimming, through whatever came next.

"I'm happy," she said, but it sounded like a question.

"Me too," Marcus said, and for the first time, it wasn't a lie. The fish turned, scales glimmering like something precious, something alive, something that didn't need to remember to keep moving forward.

He set down the phone. The storm was passing. The fish swam on.