Swimming in Circles

The pool was empty at 11 PM on a Tuesday. That's why Arthur chose this motel—the guarantee of solitude, the way the underwater light cast everything in ghostly blue ripples. He floated on his back, staring at the single cloud that had been drifting across the slice of visible sky for what felt like hours.

His wedding ring was in his pocket, heavier than it should be for something so small.

"You're going to drown yourself thinking like that," his ex-wife had said during the last fight, the one that ended everything. "You just swim in circles, Arthur. Never forward, never back."

She was right, of course. She usually was.

He'd stopped at a pet store earlier that afternoon, standing before a wall of plastic bags filled with water and tiny orange lives. One goldfish in particular caught his eye—fan-tailed, the color of fading sunset, swimming endless laps in its cramped square of water. Three dollars, the teenager said. Arthur had nodded, feeling ridiculous but unable to walk away. Something about the way it moved spoke to him.

The fish now sat in a glass bowl on the motel room's bedside table, swimming the same patient circles as its pond-bound ancestors.

His father had taught him to play baseball on the dusty diamond behind their subdivision, the same summer his mother left. "Life throws curves," his dad had said, tossing pitches that Arthur couldn't hit. "You either swing and miss, or you learn to connect." What his father hadn't mentioned was that sometimes you stood at the plate for years, watching perfect pitches go by, too paralyzed to swing at anything.

He'd missed every signal from Sarah. The late nights at the office. The way she stopped touching him when they passed in the hallway. The divorce papers that arrived like a fastball he never saw coming.

Now he was forty-three, staying in a motel with a goldfish he'd impulsively rescued, floating in a pool that smelled faintly of chlorine and other people's vacations.

The water lapped against his ears. Somewhere nearby, a television played a game show. Laughter filtered through the thin walls—someone else's happiness, someone else's life.

Arthur climbed out of the pool, water streaming from his body like the last twenty years were finally draining away. He returned to room 107, where the goldfish was still swimming its patient circles, unaware that its world was a glass bowl on a scratched table.

"Yeah," Arthur said softly. "I know."