The Goldfish Bowl

Martin stood by the open casket, adjusting his fedora. It was the same hat he'd worn to Elaine's college graduation—when they'd both been twenty-two and convinced that love could conquer anything, including his gambling debt and her father's suspicion.

Now, thirty years later, he was burying her alone.

Her father wasn't there, of course. The old bastard had died fifteen years ago, still convinced Martin was a good-for-nothing who'd knock up his daughter and leave her high and dry. The old man had been half right: Martin had knocked her up. But he'd stayed. They'd married, raised Kevin, grown old together in a house that always smelled faintly of her lavender perfume and his cigarette smoke.

"She always said you looked like a gangster in that hat," said Sarah, Elaine's sister, appearing beside him with a plastic bag in her hand.

Martin almost smiled. "She never complained when I wore it to our anniversary dinners."

"That's because she was too polite. And you always took it off before the appetizers arrived." Sarah held out the bag. "She wanted you to have this."

Inside swam a single goldfish, tiny and bright against the water.

"Bullshit," Martin said. "Elaine hasn't had a fish since Kevin won that carnival prize when he was seven. The thing died in three days. She cried for a week."

"It's not from the carnival. She bought it last month, after the diagnosis." Sarah's voice softened. "She said goldfish only remember things for ten seconds. She wanted something that wouldn't hold onto sorrow."

Martin stared at the fish swimming in tiny circles, oblivious to the widow in the black dress weeping three rows back, to the priest droning about resurrection, to the forty-pound weight pressing against Martin's chest.

"She knew," he said suddenly. "About the gambling relapse last winter. The twelve thousand I lost on that college game."

"Of course she knew, Martin. She always knew." Sarah squeezed his arm. "She said you were like that fish—forgetting the loss every morning, chasing the next shiny thing. But she also said you kept swimming, even when the bowl felt too small."

The organ music began. People started moving toward the casket. Martin adjusted his hat, trying to remember the last time he'd told Elaine he loved her without her saying it first. Trying to remember if he'd ever thanked her for staying, for forgiving, for loving him despite all the reasons not to.

The goldfish swam on, remembering nothing, carrying everything.

"I don't deserve this fish," Martin said.

"No," Sarah agreed. "You don't. But she loved you anyway. That's what you're actually getting."

Martin watched the fish dart through its tiny prison, bright and beautiful and completely unaware of the burden it now carried. He thought about all the chances he'd wasted, all the forgivenesses he'd taken for granted, all the times he'd been the bull in her china shop—careless, destructive, yet somehow never asked to leave.

He adjusted his hat one more time, squared his shoulders, and prepared to lower his wife into the ground. The goldfish swam on in its plastic bag, a tiny, living monument to a woman who'd loved a man who never quite learned how to deserve it.

Some things, he realized, were worth more than they ought to be.