The Aquarium We Keep

The goldfish in the breakroom had been here longer than any of us. Its orange scales caught the fluorescent light, turning it into something almost beautiful as it swam endless circles in its ten-gallon prison.

"You're staring at it again," Elena said, not looking up from her papaya. She ate exotic fruits like other people smoked cigarettes—a small rebellion against the midwest, against the routine, against everything our lives had become.

"It's not staring if you're both trapped in the same building," I said.

The coaxial cable snaked along the floor between our cubicles like an umbilical we refused to cut. Six months of whispered emails, of hands brushing in the server room, of dinners that ran late and explanations that ran thin. My wife had stopped asking questions. Elena's husband had never started.

"My mother called," Elena said. "She thinks I should leave him."

"What did you say?"

"I told her I'd think about it. I've been thinking about it for three years."

Outside, someone was running past our floor-to-ceiling windows. A woman in a red coat, her breath visible in the November air, moving with the desperate purpose of someone chasing something she'd already lost.

"I should start running," I said suddenly. "Physical activity. It's supposed to help with this kind of—paralysis."

Elena laughed, but her eyes stayed on her papaya. "You won't."

"You think I'm not serious?"

"I think you've been wearing the same hat to work for seven years, David. I think you refill your coffee mug at exactly 9:17 every morning. I think you changed your desktop background once, in 2019, and it's still that picture of the lake house you almost bought."

She sliced another piece of papaya. The juice ran down her thumb.

"So what does that make you?" I asked. "The brave one?"

"No. It makes me the one who knows better."

I watched the goldfish bump against the glass again and again, never learning, never stopping. Somewhere above us, the cable pulleys rattled against the track on the 14th floor, carrying someone else to somewhere else.

"My daughter asked about the fish once," I said. "She wanted to know why it keeps swimming the same pattern. I told her fish don't get bored. They don't remember they've been here before."

Elena finally looked at me. Her eyes were tired in a way I'd learned to read, a way I'd come to love.

"That's the saddest thing you've ever said to me," she said.

The goldfish turned, its orange flash brilliant and brief, and began another circle around nothing at all.