The Bear of It

The office lobby's **goldfish** floated near the glass of its bowl, its mouth opening and closing in that perpetual, silent scream that Elena felt in her own throat most days since David walked out. Three weeks of **swimming** through rooms that felt too thick with his absence, of drowning in air while everyone around her breathed fine.

She'd cut her **hair** the night he left – chopped it off with kitchen shears in a bathroom lit by harsh fluorescence, watching dark strands fall like dead things onto the linoleum. David had loved her hair long, had buried his hands in it during sex and arguments alike. Now her neck felt exposed, vulnerable to the chill of an apartment that had never really been hers anyway.

The realtor was coming at noon. David's taxidermy **bear** head still mounted above the fireplace – his pride, some Instagram-era masculine aesthetic choice she'd hated for seven years. She should take it down before the showing, but she couldn't bring herself to touch it. The glass eyes seemed to know something she didn't.

"You okay?" Marcus from accounting asked, startling her. She'd been staring at the goldfish for ten minutes, willing it toward freedom through some kind of telepathic osmosis.

"Fine," she said. "Just thinking about memory spans. How goldfish remember things for five seconds. Must be nice."

Marcus laughed awkwardly and backed away.

At lunch, Elena did it. She poured the lobby goldfish into a Poland Spring bottle and walked six blocks to the river, the water sloshing against her palm like something alive. She stood on the pier watching trash drift downstream – a plastic bag, a coffee cup, something that might have been a shoe.

She dumped the goldfish into the gray water and watched it dart away, bright orange against the murk. It would probably die. A predator or pollution or shock. But it was swimming, really swimming, in something bigger than a bowl.

Back at the apartment, she finally climbed onto the fireplace mantel and ripped the bear head from the wall, leaving a jagged hole in the drywall. She carried it to the dumpster and heaved it over the side, listening to the glass crack when it landed.

The realtor found her sitting on the floor, running her hand over the damaged wall, feeling strangely light. "The market's soft," the woman said, "but this could work."

"It'll work," Elena said. Her hands smelled like river water. "Everything's going to work."