Goldfish in the Orange Lamp

The first night Mara moved out, I made myself a salad. Just spinach, raw and bitter, no dressing. I stood at the kitchen counter eating it with my fingers, watching the dust motes swim through the cone of the orange streetlamp that cut across our empty dining room.

The tank on the mantelpiece held a single goldfish—Arthur, the pet she'd refused to leave behind. 'He's your problem now,' she'd said, slamming the door with the finality of a period at the end of a sentence we'd spent seven years writing.

I sprinkled fish food into the bowl. Arthur broke the surface, his mouth opening and closing like a silent accusation.

'Maybe she's right,' I told him. 'Maybe I am emotionally unavailable. Maybe I do have intimacy issues.'

Arthur just kept swimming, his orange scales catching the light. The simple bastard didn't know he was trapped in glass. Or maybe he did, and that was the point.

The week before, at her office's holiday party, I'd spent three hours trapped in a conversation about artisanal mayonnaise with her boss's husband. I'd wanted to be anywhere else. I'd wanted to be swimming alone in dark water, silent and unobserved. Instead, I'd nodded and smiled and thought about how Mara's laugh sounded different now—thinner, like she was saving the real version for someone else.

Now I dropped the spinach leaves into Arthur's bowl. They floated on the surface like tiny lily pads. He nudged them, unimpressed.

'You don't want it either,' I said. 'You know it's just a thing that's supposed to be good for you.'

My phone buzzed. A text from her: Did you feed Arthur?

I watched the spinach sink slowly through the water, settling on the gravel bottom like green snow. The orange streetlamp flickered outside, then steady again. The whole world was just people eating things they didn't want, in rooms they hadn't chosen, pretending not to notice that everyone was slowly, methodically drowning.

I didn't answer. Instead, I sat on the couch and watched the fish swim through his refusal, round and round in circles, building a whole life out of nothing but motion.