The Goldfish on the Counter

Elena moved through her apartment like a zombie, three weeks after Mark left. The divorce papers sat on the kitchen counter, weightless and crushing all at once. She'd started taking vitamin D supplements—her doctor said it might help with the lethargy, with the way she stared at ceilings for hours, but mostly they just made her feel like she was performing wellness.

Buster, their golden retriever, followed her from room to room, his nails clicking against hardwood. He'd stopped waiting by the door, stopped that hopeful whine whenever a car pulled into the driveway. Dogs, she'd read, forgot after two weeks. She wondered what that said about her that she couldn't.

The goldfish bowl sat on the windowsill, Mark's parting gift. "You take him," he'd said, "I can't." She'd never even liked the fish—a comet with deteriorating fins, named Comet by some previous iteration of Mark's optimism. But now she found herself staring at it, drifting in its filtered light, barely moving.

"At least one of us is thriving," she told the fish.

Her phone buzzed. A dating app notification. Someone named David, 36, software engineer. She deleted the app instead.

The vitamins sat in a neat orange bottle beside the unwashed dishes. She swallowed two anyway.

Buster rested his head on her knee. His brown eyes held that terrifying, unconditional quality that made her want to weep or scream or simply exist more honestly than she'd been capable of lately.

"It's just us now," she whispered.

The goldfish stirred, surfacing for a flake of food. Alive in its small world, beautiful and terrible in its refusal to notice what it had lost.