Inertia

The goldfish had been floating sideways for three days before Elena finally said something about it.

"We should flush him," she said, not looking up from her papaya, the orange flesh glistening against her wedding ring. The fruit tasted like desperation — sweet, cloying, the flavor of a marriage ten years past its expiration date.

"He might recover," David said, though they both knew better. The fish was a metaphor neither of them wanted to acknowledge.

They'd come to Hawaii to save everything — the therapists had recommended it, somewhere away from the house with its silent accusations and separate bedrooms. But paradise was just another place to not speak.

The baseball game played on the restaurant television, muted, players moving like dancers in a performance nobody watched. David remembered taking his father to games before the dementia took him completely. At least with his father, the forgetting had been gradual, something that happened to him. With Elena, it was a choice. She'd simply decided to stop wanting the things he wanted.

"You used to love baseball," she said, following his gaze. She'd ordered papaya every morning that week, though he knew she hated it. Another performance.

"I still do."

"You haven't watched a game in years."

The server refilled their water glasses, the ice clinking, painfully loud. They were that couple at the next table — the ones everyone else felt sorry for, the ones who couldn't remember why they'd started hating each other.

"We should flush the fish when we get back," David said finally. "If he's even still there."

"If."

Outside, a palm frond caught the wind, sunlight and shadow flickering across the table like memories surfacing and submerging, all those small deaths you accumulate in a lifetime with someone. The fish would die. The papaya would rot. The baseball season would end. Something had to break or they would just keep swimming in their diminishing circles, waiting for whatever came next to finally finish them.

"I don't want to go back," she said.

"To the room?"

To any of it. Her eyes were wet, finally. Something broke open in his chest, something like relief, like recognition, like the first real thing between them in years.

"Then let's not," David said.

The goldfish was dead. At least one of them could finally say it out loud.