The Goldfish in the Palm

Maria pressed her palm against the glass tank, watching the goldfish dart through artificial water. Another Tuesday at the office, another proposal due at midnight, another night she wouldn't see her children awake.

"You look like a zombie," David said, leaning against her cubicle wall. He was the senior partner, thirty years her senior, currently paying for her dinners and her silence.

"Rough night," she said, not meeting his eyes. The cable knit sweater she'd worn to hide the marks on her neck felt too warm, too suffocating.

He moved closer. "Same tonight?"

She should say no. She should go home, swim through the wreckage of her marriage, try to remember why she'd once loved Peter. But Peter was drowning in medical bills and empty prescription bottles, and she was tired of being the only one swimming upstream.

The goldfish bumped its nose against the glass, trapped in its endless loop.

"Yes," she heard herself say.

Later, in his condo with its floor-to-ceiling windows, she let him undress her while thinking about palm readings she'd gotten in college. "You have two lifelines," the psychic had said. She'd laughed then. Now she understood—one life she lived, another she endured.

David's phone buzzed on the nightstand. His wife. He ignored it, the way Maria ignored the missed calls from her daughter's school, the way they all ignored the lives crumbling around them.

"You're somewhere else," he said.

Maria stared at the ceiling, counting the dots in the acoustic plaster, anything to avoid meeting his eyes. "Just thinking about goldfish."

"What?"

"Their memory spans. Seven seconds, they say. Imagine that—every moment brand new, nothing to regret."

David laughed, not understanding, and she realized she was already forgetting his name, already forgetting why any of this mattered. The goldfish had the right idea. Memory was just another form of drowning.

She got dressed in the dark and didn't go home.