The Architecture of Small Things

Marissa stood before the vanity mirror, pulling a gray strand from her temple. It was the third one this week, each one a tiny betrayal. Her hair—once chestnut and reckless—now obeyed only the discipline of expensive serums and denial.

Downstairs, David was arranging the supplements in their daily pill organizer. The vitamin regimen had started as a joke between them, a response to turning thirty-five, then forty. Now at forty-six, it was sacramental. Vitamin D for the bones they never broke, magnesium for the sleep they rarely found, B-complex for the energy that had evaporated somewhere around 2012.

"The goldfish is floating again," he said when she entered the kitchen.

"Sidney's been dead for three years, David."

"I know. I mean the new one. The one you bought to replace the one that died to replace Sidney."

They'd bought the house because of the pool—Marissa had imagined children swimming in it, their laughter ricocheting off the pyramid-shaped trellis her brother had built as a wedding gift. Now the trellis rotted quietly in the corner, and the pool sat stagnant beneath its winter cover like a scar.

"I'm not replacing another fish," she said. "I'm not doing it anymore."

"It's just a fish, Marissa."

"It's not just a fish. It's the fifth one. They keep dying, David."

"Maybe we're doing something wrong. The water, the food—"

"Or maybe things just die. That's what they do."

She opened the back door. The heat hit her like a judgment. The pool cover had sagged in the middle, collecting rain and debris, a dark and stagnant eye. She remembered swimming here alone last September, weightless and suspended, wondering why she'd never felt weightless in her own marriage.

The goldfish bowl sat on the counter, its inhabitant motionless near the gravel.

"Flush it," she said.

"What?"

"Flush it. Then we sell the house. We find something smaller. Something without a pool. Without room for things we can't keep alive."

David looked at her, really looked at her, for what felt like the first time in months.

"What would we do instead?"

"I don't know," she said, stepping into the heat. "Start swimming somewhere else."