The Art of Drowning

The spinach salad sat untouched on the table between them, wilting under the fluorescent lights of the restaurant where they'd had their first date three years ago. Sarah watched a leaf curl at the edge, brown and brittle, and thought about how some things decayed slowly while others fell apart all at once.

'I'm moving out,' Marcus said, not looking at her. He was staring at the goldfish swimming in the tank on the wall behind her, their orange scales catching light as they circled endlessly in their glass prison.

Sarah felt something crack open in her chest. 'When?'

'This weekend. I found a place in Wicker Park.' He finally met her eyes. 'It's not working. You know it's not working.'

She did know. She'd known for months, since the miscarriage that neither of them could speak about, since the silence had grown thick enough to choke on. They'd become roommates who occasionally touched each other in the dark, both pretending there was still something there.

'The fish,' she said, surprising herself. 'What about the goldfish?'

Marcus laughed, short and sharp. 'You want the fish?'

'No. I just... we bought them together. That day in Chinatown. Do you remember?'

He nodded slowly. 'You said they were our start. Our family.' The words hung between them, heavy with everything they'd lost.

Later that night, alone in the apartment that already felt hollow, Sarah stood in front of the fish tank. She watched them swimming—mindless, hungry, alive in a way she couldn't seem to be anymore. She thought about diving in, about the cool water closing over her head, about how it might feel to finally stop moving through air that felt too thin, too wrong.

Instead she fed them, watched the flakes drift down like snow in a paperweight world. Then she went to the kitchen and made herself a spinach salad, standing at the counter in the dark, eating slowly, deliberately, forcing herself to taste something green and living while the house hummed with the quiet of things ending.