Goldfish in the Afterlife

Mara stood in the checkout line at Whole Foods, clutching a plastic bag containing a single orange. It had been three weeks since Thomas left, and this was the first time she'd bothered to buy fresh produce. The apartment had become a museum of their life together — his coffee mug still stain-ringed on the counter, his paperback splayed on the nightstand, the goldfish they'd won at a carnival two years ago still swimming in its bowl on the dresser, oblivious to the collapse of her marriage.

She'd named the fish Walter, after Thomas's father. Thomas had laughed so hard he'd choked on his beer. Now she fed Walter every morning, watched him glide through his tiny kingdom, and wondered if fish experienced loneliness. She wondered if she was becoming like her mother, who after her divorce had kept her ex-husband's golf clubs in the garage for seven years.

"You're in a zombie state, honey," her sister had said over drinks last night. "Just walking through your life like you're already dead to it."

Mara had bristled. "I'm grieving. There's a difference."

"Is there?" Her sister had signaled the waiter for another round. "Because you haven't applied for that promotion. You haven't called back about the apartment in Santa Monica. You're still feeding his damn fish."

Now, standing in her kitchen, Mara peeled the orange. The scent hit her with violence — citrus and sunlight and summer evenings on their balcony, Thomas reading aloud from a novel while she watched the sky darken. She remembered how he'd looked at her then, like she was the only person who'd ever truly seen him. She remembered how he'd stopped looking at her that way somewhere around year five, how their conversations had become transactional: whose turn to walk the dog, did you pay the electric bill, what do you want for dinner.

The goldfish swam to the surface, mouth opening and closing in silent repetition.

Mara carried her orange to the fishbowl. Walter seemed to regard her with his glassy eye.

"You know what?" she whispered. "I'm not dead yet."

She ate the orange in three messy sections, juice dripping down her chin, sticky and bright and alive. Then she called her sister. Then she called about the Santa Monica apartment. Then she packed a box with Thomas's things.

The goldfish she kept. Some endings deserve witnesses.