Goldfish at Orange Hour

The cat sits on the counter, watching me pack. His name is Bruno, though neither of us has called him that in months. Since the funeral, he's just become the cat — a creature of silent judgment and sudden demands.

I pull the spinach from the refrigerator. It's wilted, slimy at the edges, exactly like everything else in this apartment. Marcus bought it three days before he died. Three days. The spinach has outlived my husband by a week now. I dump it into the sink, where water from the dripping faucet pools around the darkening leaves.

The goldfish bowl sits on the windowsill, catching what's left of the day's light. Marcus won it at a carnival when we were twenty-two, drunk on cheap beer and the terrifying certainty that we'd last forever. The fish — a comet with scales like tarnished copper — has survived three apartments, two cross-country moves, and now, somehow, Marcus. It circles its bowl in endless loops, mouth opening and closing in what looks like a scream.

I can't decide what's worse: that the fish will likely outlive me too, or that Marcus left me alone with a creature that requires so little but demands to be fed regardless of grief.

The sunset paints the kitchen in bruised orange, the color of closing time at bars where we met, of the sodium streetlamp outside our first apartment, of the pill bottle still sitting on his nightstand. I should throw it away. The bottle, not the fish. Probably the fish too.

Instead, I shake flakes into the bowl. The fish breaks its hypnotic circling, darting to the surface. Bruno meows, winding between my legs, hungry in the way only animals can be — entirely without shame or memory.

Tomorrow, I'll call the realtor. Tomorrow, I'll find someone to take the cat. Tonight, I sit on the kitchen floor and watch the goldfish eat, while the water drips, drips, drips, and the orange light drains from the room like time itself, leaving only the dark and the quiet and the spinach rotting in the sink.