Signal Loss

The coaxial cable lay coiled on the floor like a dead snake, its copper guts exposed where she'd gnawed through it during the argument. Three A.M. arguments were always the worst — stripped bare of daylight's mercying filters, every accusation sharpened to a point.

Marcus sat on the edge of the bathtub running his fingers through his hair, counting the strands that came loose in his hand. Forty-seven gray hairs last month. Sixty-two this month. At thirty-three, he was aging in dog years, the stress of this marriage eating him alive from the inside out.

In the living room, the goldfish — Carolus, named after the Linnaean taxonomy she'd made him memorize on their first date — swam in slow, mournful circles. Carolus had outlasted three apartments, two miscarriages, and Marcus's father. There was something obscene about a creature's capacity to survive when everything else was dying.

"You're going to lose your job," she'd screamed earlier, pointing at the severed cable. "Your boss calls at eight, Marcus. What are you going to tell him? That you can't connect because your wife thinks you're having an affair with the new analyst?"

He wasn't. But the accusation had felt true anyway, because he'd considered it. He'd considered lots of things recently. Starting over. Being someone else in a different city where nobody knew about the babies that never happened or the mortgage they couldn't afford.

Marcus stood up, rinsing the loose hairs down the drain. They swirled away like everything else in this life — temporary, disposable, easily replaced.

He walked into the living room and sprinkled fish food into the bowl. Carolus rose to the surface, mouth opening and closing in silent supplication.

"Eat," Marcus whispered. "Just eat."

The first gray light of dawn filtered through the blinds. In twenty minutes, his boss would call. In an hour, the cable guy would come to repair what she'd broken. They would apologize to each other, fold themselves back into the architecture of their shared existence, and continue.

But watching the goldfish swim, Marcus understood something with terrible clarity: some creatures survive in small bowls because they've forgotten what the ocean looks like.

He picked up his phone and booked a one-way ticket to Portland.