The Goldfish at Bear Lake

Emma swallowed her vitamin D supplement with the same mechanical efficiency she applied to everything now—her job, her marriage, the careful curation of her social media presence. Forty-two years old and still trying to convince herself that adulthood would eventually feel like something she'd grown into rather than something she was enduring.

"You're doing that thing," Mark said, not looking up from his phone. "That fox face. Like you're calculating something."

She'd made the mistake of telling him once that her grandmother called it her fox face—the way her brows knit when she was thinking, or plotting, or merely holding back something she couldn't say.

"I'm not calculating anything."

"You are. You always are."

The therapist had suggested a weekend away, something to reconnect them before they became roommates who occasionally shared a bed. Bear Lake had seemed picturesque in the brochure: swimming, hiking, enough distance from their usual arguments that maybe they'd remember why they'd chosen each other.

But the cabin smelled of other people's vacations, and Mark spent most of his time responding to emails from his boss. Emma sat on the dock, watching a goldfish dart between the reeds—some abandoned pet that had grown too large for its bowl, now surviving somehow in the wild.

"It's not natural," Mark said when she told him. "Goldfish don't belong in lakes. They're invasive."

"It found a way."

"That's not the point, Em. They destroy the ecosystem. Choke out everything else."

She'd wanted to scream that she wasn't choking anything, that she was merely trying to breathe. Instead she went swimming in the murky water, letting the lake swallow her silence.

That night, Mark finally put his phone away. "I talked to my sister," he said. "She says we should try counseling again."

"Counseling won't fix that you don't see me anymore."

"I see you."

"No. You see the version of me that fits into your life. The one who takes vitamins and keeps the house clean and never asks for more than you're willing to give."

He didn't deny it.

"What if I don't want to be practical anymore?" she asked. "What if I'd rather be like the fox? Wild and calculating and unpredictable?"

"You're not wild, Emma. You're my wife."

The goldfish was gone when she checked the next morning—maybe a heron had eaten it, maybe it had simply moved deeper into the dark water. Emma packed her bag, vitamin bottles clinking together in the side pocket. She'd tell Mark she was leaving when they got home. Or maybe she wouldn't tell him at all. Some things, she realized, were better left unsaid—like the fact that she'd never felt more herself than when she was swimming alone in that cold, dark water, finally free of the weight of expectations.