Goldfish in the Ashtray

The goldfish bowl sat on her kitchen counter like a suspended universe. I watched it while she packed her suitcase in the bedroom, the zipper's teeth catching and releasing with each vicious tug. We'd bought the fish together three years ago, at that county fair where the heat made everything shimmer and the carnival workers looked exhausted behind their painted smiles. We named him Lazarus because he'd survived the car ride home in a plastic bag that bounced against my knee every time I hit a pothole.

Now Lazarus circled his bowl in endless laps, orange scales flickering under the halogen light, and I felt like a zombie moving through the final scene of a movie I couldn't remember choosing to watch. That's what our marriage had become—not dead exactly, but walking dead, hollowed out by slow grief and resentments we'd stopped naming aloud.

"You can keep him," she called from the bedroom, and I heard something crack in her voice. "I can't bear to look at him anymore."

The word bear made something tighten in my chest. She used to say that about everything she couldn't handle: I can't bear the silence when you don't come home, I can't bear how you look through me instead of at me, I can't bear this house where every corner holds a ghost of what we promised each other.

I'd been swimming underwater for so long that I'd forgotten what it felt like to breathe air. The affair had been like surfacing—gasping, terrible, necessary oxygen. Now the guilt was a second skin.

"Take him," I said finally, and she appeared in the doorway with her suitcase, looking younger than she'd looked in years. "You always loved him more."

She didn't take the fish. She took her suitcase and walked out the door, leaving me alone in the apartment with the ticking clock and Lazarus making his endless circles. I sprinkled flakes into his bowl, watched them spiral downward like tiny parachutes, and wondered how something could keep swimming in the same space forever without ever realizing it was trapped.