Goldfish Season

The goldfish bowl sat on Marion's desk like a forgotten promise, its water clouding with neglect. Three months ago, she'd brought it to the office with such enthusiasm—'something living to brighten up this gray box,' she'd said. Now the fish swam in sluggish circles, its orange scales dull in the fluorescent light.

David watched it from across the cubicle divide. Everything between them had become like that bowl—stagnant, cloudy, something that had once seemed bright now reduced to mere maintenance.

'You're staring again,' Marion said without turning from her screen. Her hair fell in a copper curtain around her face, the same shade as the fish's fading color. She'd stopped dyeing it months ago. Let the gray come, she'd said. Let it be what it is.

'The water needs changing,' David said.

'So does everything.' She finally turned, and there it was—that look she'd given him since the miscarriage. Not accusation. Just exhaustion. A kind of hollowing out.

They'd been trying for two years. The fertility treatments had cost them their savings, their sex life, their ability to look at each other without calculations running beneath the surface—fertile days, temperature charts, the increasingly clinical vocabulary of possibility. Now they were just two people who shared a bed and a mortgage and a history that felt less like a foundation and more like debris.

'My mother called,' Marion said. 'She asked if we'd thought about adoption.' She laughed, but there was no humor in it. Just the sound of something breaking.

David stood and crossed to her desk, reaching into the bowl with the net. The fish darted away, frantic.

'What are you doing?'

'Changing the water.' He poured the old water into the trash can, watching it darken the paper beneath. 'My grandmother used to say goldfish have three-second memories. That they can't remember being unhappy.' He transferred the fish to the temporary container. 'I used to think that sounded peaceful.'

Marion's fingers found his wrist, her thumb pressing against his pulse point. 'You think I don't remember? That I can just—forget what we were?' She squeezed, hard enough to hurt. 'I remember everything, David. That's the problem.'

He looked at her then—really looked. At the lines carving deeper around her mouth, at the hair she'd stopped caring about, at the woman who'd become a stranger through no fault of her own. The goldfish swam in its temporary home, oblivious to the rescue happening around it.

'So do I,' he said. 'So do I.'

Together they watched the water clear.