Goldfish in the Rain

Margaret stood in the rain, her black hat drooping like a drowned crow. The funeral had ended hours ago, but she couldn't bring herself to leave the cemetery. The water pooled around her patent leather shoes, mirroring the gray sky above.

Her father had been a bull of a man—stubborn, charging through life without regard for who he gored along the way. Even in death, he'd managed to complicate things. The will had been a mess of revisions and conditions, like he was playing some final game from beyond the grave.

She remembered the summer she was twelve, when he'd brought home a carnival goldfish in a plastic bag. "Everything dies eventually," he'd said, dumping it into their pond without ceremony. Margaret had spent weeks running to the water's edge every morning, checking for that flash of orange beneath the algae.

The goldfish had survived somehow. It outlived her mother, outlived her father's second wife, outlived Margaret's first marriage. Last week, she'd found it floating belly-up when she went to check on the house.

Now she was the last one left. The weight of it pressed against her chest like a physical thing. She'd spent thirty years running from this moment—from the responsibility, from the memories, from the disappointment in his eyes whenever she'd tried to explain that she didn't want his business, his life, his expectations.

The old groundskeeper was approaching with his umbrella. Margaret adjusted her hat, straightened her spine. She would sell the house. She would donate the business. She would finally be free.

But as she turned toward her car, she caught sight of the pond through the cemetery fence. The water was still, dark, hiding everything beneath its surface. And somewhere down there, perhaps, the goldfish had simply let go.

Margaret stopped running.