Signal Loss

The goldfish circled its bowl in endless revolutions, its orange scales catching the afternoon light that slanted through dusty blinds. Maya watched it, her third drink of the evening forgotten on the coaster. Somewhere beyond these thin walls, the city hummed with connections she couldn't quite make.

"Your palm," he'd said that morning, running his thumb along the lines of her hand. "You'll have a long life. But love—" He'd paused, and she'd watched his throat work. "Love comes late."

Now she sat alone with the goldfish and the cat who'd appeared at her door three weeks ago, a stray with one ear that refused to stand up. The cat wound through her legs, demanding attention she couldn't summon. She knelt to stroke its fur, thinking about how easy it was to be needed by something that asked nothing else.

The cable box blinked its single red light—service interrupted. Again. She'd stopped calling to complain. What was the point? More automated voices, more holds, more apologies that meant nothing. The cable company didn't care about her loneliness any more than the goldfish cared about its infinite looping existence.

But she kept the fish because Arthur had given it to her. "Something to care for," he'd said, three years into their marriage, as if caring was something you could learn like a language. As if love was a series of inputs and outputs, reliable as cable signal.

She reached for the phone, then stopped. Her palm tingled where the psychic had touched it that afternoon—a foolish impulse, a stranger's booth at the farmer's market, but she'd been desperate enough to pay forty dollars for someone to tell her she wasn't disappearing.

"You meet someone soon," the woman had said, eyes on her palm. "Autumn. He's tall, works with his hands."

Autumn was three months away. The goldfish would still be swimming in circles. The cat would still be weaving through her rooms. The cable would still flicker and fail. And Maya would still be here, waiting for a future that had already been written in lines she couldn't read herself.

The fish pressed its mouth to the glass, blowing bubbles. Maya pressed her palm to the opposite side, feeling the vibration of nothing at all.