Lightning in the Empty Aquarium

Margaret stood in the center of David's living room, surrounded by half-filled boxes. The vitamins were hers — a bottle of B-complex she'd left on his windowsill three months ago, when they still pretended this was just a break. She twisted the cap and dry-swallowed three, chasing them with the bitterness of her own name on his tongue when they'd fought.

The baseball sat on the mantle, a signed souvenir from their first date. He'd taken her to a minor league game, drunk on overpriced beer and the electric possibility of each other's hands brushing in the dark. 'Like lightning,' he'd said, that first night, though she'd known even then that lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place.

'Margaret.' His voice from the doorway, weary and familiar.

She didn't turn. 'I'm taking the goldfish.'

'You hate that fish. You called it a 'sphinx' because it just sits there staring, asking questions it already knows the answers to.'

'That's why I'm taking it.' She finally faced him. 'It knows something we don't.'

Outside, thunder cracked. Summer storm rolling in off the lake, the kind they used to watch from his balcony, wrapped in blankets that smelled like detergent and each other. The goldfish's bowl caught the gray light, its inhabitant suspended in that terrible wisdom of creatures who cannot close their eyes.

'David, you know what that sphinx riddle is? The one about what walks on four legs, then two, then three?' Her voice didn't waver. 'It's about how we start whole and end broken.'

'Jesus, Margaret.' He ran a hand through his hair, already thinning. 'You always make everything so —'

'Profound? Tragic? Meaningful?' She lifted the goldfish bowl, water sloshing against the glass. 'At least I'm still trying to find meaning.'

The first lightning strike illuminated his face, all the ways she'd memorized it and all the ways she'd forgotten. She carried her sphinx to the door, vitamins dissolving in her stomach like time, baseball still gathering dust on the mantle where their beginning had turned into their ending.

'Keep the fish,' she said, setting it down gently. 'Maybe it'll tell you something.'