The Aquarium at the End of Things

The date was not going well.

"I feel like we're just... swimming in circles," Elena said, staring at the gin martini she'd barely touched. Across the table, Marcus made a face like he'd swallowed something sour.

They were at Océan, the kind of overpriced restaurant where the walls were living aquariums, and she was watching a school of neon tetras move in synchronized indifference to her dying marriage.

"That's what fish do, El. They swim." He signaled the waiter for another scotch. "It's not profound."

The trouble wasn't that they'd stopped loving each other, exactly. The trouble was that she'd stopped knowing who he was, or maybe she never had. He was a riddle she'd stopped trying to solve—a human sphinx with increasingly cryptic answers to questions she was too exhausted to ask.

"Remember how we used to talk?" she said. "About everything. About having kids. About growing old in that house we loved."

"We talk now."

"We exchange information. We coordinate schedules. We don't talk." She thought about the goldfish bowl in their entryway, a wedding gift from his sister, and how she'd had to explain to him three times last week that it was his turn to feed them. Their life together had become something you kept on autopilot, sustaining itself through sheer habit.

Marcus rubbed his temples. "Not tonight. Please."

"When, then?" Her voice broke before she could stop it.

Behind him, on the restaurant's back wall, a massive catfish—ironic, she thought darkly—drifted past with open-mouthed indifference. Its glassy eyes held no judgment, no recognition. No expectations.

"I don't know." He looked at her then, really looked at her, and she saw the exhaustion she'd been ignoring for months. The way the gray had spread through his hair at the temples. The lines around his mouth she'd stopped kissing goodnight.

"Maybe we don't," he said quietly.

The waiter appeared with his scotch. Elena ordered another martini—very, very dry.

"Maybe we don't," she agreed.

Outside, rain began to fall. She thought about the goldfish at home, swimming in their tiny bowl, and how they would probably outlast this. How some things survived on nothing but habit, how some creatures needed very little to keep going, and maybe that was the saddest part of all.