Goldfish in the Deep End

Sarah found the first goldfish floating belly-up when she slipped into the apartment complex pool at 2 AM. The water was mercury-still, reflecting the half-moon like a cracked eye. She was thirty-four, three months post-divorce, and swimming laps had become the only thing that quieted the static in her head.

She fished it out with the leaf skimmer. A comet goldfish, orange fading to translucent white where something—maybe a bird, maybe worse—had sampled it. She wondered how it got there. Kids, probably. Some parent's impulse buy released into chlorined water when the novelty wore thin.

"Stupid fish," she muttered, the sound of her own voice startling. The divorce papers had said *irreconcilable differences*, but really, David had just stopped seeing her. She'd become background noise, like the hum of the refrigerator or his mother's weekly calls. Invisible until she made herself impossible to ignore.

The orange tabby from 4B appeared at the pool's edge, tail twitching. It watched her with predatory interest, perhaps hoping for another floater. Sarah had never learned its name. The cat belonged to the elderly woman who always left her hair in the shower drain—long, gray strands that looped like question marks no one bothered to answer.

Two more goldfish the next night. Three the night after. They kept appearing, and she kept removing them, performing this small, strange labor in the darkness. The apartment manager posted a sign: NO PETS IN POOL. But the goldfish continued.

She started imagining they were messages. Each one a tiny orange sentential: *someone sees you.*

On the fifth night, she found a single goldfish still alive, darting into the deep end when the flashlight beam swept across the water. She watched it through ripples, this impossible survivor thriving where it shouldn't, defying chlorine and neglect and the odds stacked against anything small and fragile.

"You're not supposed to be here," she whispered. "But here you are anyway."

The tabby yawned, unimpressed.

Sarah sat on the edge, legs dangling in water that had become cold. Her hair dripped down her back like wet rope. The goldfish surfaced, mouth opening and closing in silent supplication.

She didn't fish it out.

Some things, she decided, deserved the chance to keep swimming against the current. Even if they were alone. Even if they were the only ones left. Especially then.