The Goldfish Memorial

The fedora sat on her kitchen table for three weeks before Elena could touch it. David's hat — a ridiculous, caramel-colored thing he'd bought on some impulse trip to Chicago, the one he wore to every dinner party even when no one else was dressed up. He'd left it at her apartment the last time they spoke, after the fight about the promotion she'd taken over him. "We're different now," he'd said, leaving the hat behind like collateral, like he expected her to hold it until he forgave her.

Now David was dead, and the hat was all she had left of their decade-long friendship except a fish.

Not even a good fish. A Walmart goldfish, cloudy-orange and stupid, that David had won at some carnival and pressed into her hands because his landlord didn't allow pets. "Take him," he'd said, shoving the plastic bag toward her. "He's got my eyes."

Elena stared at the fishbowl on her counter, watching the goldfish — David Jr., absurdly named — float near the surface. It had been three days since she fed him. Or maybe four. Time had blurred since the funeral, since the phone call from David's mother saying he'd overdosed, since Elena realized she couldn't remember the last time she'd told him she loved him.

She swallowed her morning vitamins with a gulp of lukewarm coffee — Vitamin D for the bone-deep exhaustion, B-complex for the anxiety that kept her awake until 3 AM, iron for the anemia that had her doctor frowning at her bloodwork. All the pills in the world couldn't fix what was actually wrong with her.

Her phone buzzed. Sarah, from work. "Can you cover the Richardson meeting?"

Elena typed yes, then deleted it. Typed no, then deleted that too. David would have known what to say. David would have made some terrible joke about Richardson's toupee and told her to take a mental health day, would have come over with takeout and that awful hat and let her cry on his shoulder.

Instead she had a goldfish.

She sprinkled flakes into the bowl and watched David Jr. swim upward, opening and closing his mouth. The fish was probably dying too — goldfish from carnivals never lasted long. Everything David had touched seemed to fall apart in her hands.

"Fuck," she said, aloud, to the empty apartment. "Fuck."

Elena picked up the fedora. It still smelled like him — cigarettes and sandalwood and that cologne he'd worn since college. She put it on her head, tilted it at the angle he'd favored, looked at herself in the kitchen mirror. She looked ridiculous. She looked like someone trying too hard to inhabit a ghost.

The goldfish floated to the surface, belly-up.

Elena stared at it for a long moment, waiting for the movement, for the gasping breath. Nothing. Just like David. Just like that.

She flushed the fish down the toilet, watching the orange scales spiral away. Then she called Sarah back.

"I'll take the meeting," she said, and put on the hat.