Swimming in Circles

The goldfish had outlived their marriage by six months. Marcus stood before the bowl, watching the orange scales flash in the dim kitchen light, flaking food onto the water's surface with the same mechanical patience he'd brought to fifteen years of Shared Sunday Breakfasts and The Annual Holiday Card and the quiet, devastating choreography of two people who had forgotten how to see each other.

"She needs a larger tank," Clara said from the doorway. She was already dressed for work, her blazer crisp, her face arranged in the expression of calm efficiency she'd worn like armor since their last conversation that actually meant anything — four years ago, maybe five, about the possibility of children they stopped discussing but never stopped failing to conceive.

"She's fine."

"She's swimming in circles."

"Aren't we all." The words slipped out, uninvited.

Clara's hand tightened on her coffee mug. "I spoke to David yesterday. He asked how you were."

David, who had been Marcus's best friend since college until Marcus started sleeping with his wife during the Year Everyone Stopped Pretending, which they'd all agreed never to speak of again but which lived in every silence between them.

"What did you tell him?"

"That you were fine. That we were fine." She set down the mug. "Marcus, we can't keep doing this. Living like — " She searched for the word she wouldn't say.

Like zombies, he thought. Like something that should have died years ago but kept moving through sheer momentum, feeding on habit and fear and the accumulated weight of a thousand unspoken resentments. Their love hadn't died — it had rotted, putrefied, reanimated itself as something that wore their faces and spoke their names but no longer knew what it meant to be alive.

The goldfish surfaced, mouth opening and closing in the silent kitchen. A creature renowned for its seven-second memory, blessedly unable to recall the previous lap around the glass, unable to recognize that tomorrow would be exactly the same as today, forever.

"I'll look at larger tanks this weekend," Marcus said.

Clara nodded, once, the way she'd nodded at everything for years. She picked up her purse and left without kissing him goodbye. The door clicked shut.

Marcus pressed his palm to the glass, feeling the cold water shiver against his skin. The goldfish brushed his fingers, its memory resetting with every circuit, forever new, forever trapped in the same small circle, swimming through a life it would never remember choosing.