The Goldfish on the Nightstand

The cable guy was in her apartment again — third time this month. Sarah watched him work, her body moving through the motions of politeness while her mind stayed elsewhere, floating in that familiar fog she'd been living in since the funeral. She felt like a zombie, really, her emotional centers burned out, leaving only the mechanical parts of herself to function.

"It's the wiring in the building," the technician said, not looking up from the junction box. "Old cable infrastructure. Can't handle modern bandwidth."

Sarah nodded. She knew about things that couldn't handle what was asked of them.

On her nightstand, the goldfish bowl caught the afternoon light. Leonard, her brother's fish, swam in endless circles, his three-second memory a mercy she sometimes envied. Mark had bought the fish two weeks before his accident — something about wanting a low-stakes responsibility. Now Leonard was her responsibility, along with everything else Mark had left behind.

"Ma'am?" The cable guy's voice pulled her back. "You've got a signal now, but I'd recommend the upgraded package. More channels, better reliability."

She looked at him — really looked — and saw the exhaustion under his eyes, the wedding ring he kept twisting. He probably went home to a house full of problems he couldn't fix either.

"No thanks," she said. "I don't watch much TV anyway."

After he left, she fed Leonard. The fish rose to the surface, his mouth opening and closing in that perpetual O of surprise. She'd read somewhere that goldfish could recognize faces, remember patterns. Maybe Leonard remembered Mark. Maybe, in his small glass world, he was waiting for someone who would never come back.

The cable box flickered to life, screens bleeding into each other — cooking shows, news cycles, reality TV, lives that weren't hers. She turned it off and sat in the silence with Leonard, both of them swimming in circles, both of them alive in the most technical sense.

"You're doing fine, Leonard," she whispered to the empty room. "We're both doing fine."