The Goldfish on the Twenty-Seventh Floor

Elena first noticed the gray hair three weeks after Arthur moved out—a single, defiant strand amidst the chestnut waves she'd spent forty years cultivating. She tweezed it standing in her office bathroom, the fluorescent lights revealing every imperfection she'd successfully ignored since her thirtieth birthday.

At work, the goldfish in the break tank bobbed lazily, orange and oblivious. Three weeks ago, it had been named Barnaby. Now, according to the sign on the bowl, it was Kevin. Someone—probably Greg from accounting—kept replacing them when they died, which happened with suspicious regularity. Corporate policy, Elena supposed. Cycle of life, budget category: office supplies.

"You okay?" asked Sarah, the new hire, twenty-two with hair that had never known the betrayal of a root touch-up.

"Fine," Elena said, which was what she always said.

But she wasn't fine. She was haunted by papaya.

Specifically: the papaya she'd bought three Saturdays ago, sitting on her counter because Arthur had always hated it, said it smelled like feet, said only pretentious people ate tropical fruit in Ohio. She'd sliced it open anyway, that first Saturday alone in her kitchen, letting the juice run down her wrist—sweet and musky and uncompromisingly itself.

Now she brought papaya to work every Wednesday, slicing it in the breakroom while watching Kevin swim through his existential little aquarium, waiting for the inevitable. Sometimes Greg came in, made a face at the smell, and complained about the air conditioning. Elena would lick papaya juice from her thumb and think: at least something in this building is honest about rotting.

Today, Kevin was floating at the top. Upside down.

Elena stared at him through glass curved like a magnifying lens, his orange scales catching light from windows that looked out on a city of people who'd all rather be somewhere else. She thought about hair dye and mortgage payments and the papaya in her lunch bag, getting warm. About the way Arthur had left without raising his voice, like an employee putting in two weeks' notice.

"Damn," she said aloud.

Sarah looked up from her phone. "Kevin again?"

"Yeah."

"I can get another one. There's a pet store near my apartment."

Elena looked at the twenty-two-year-old with all her hair and all her ahead, at the upside-down fish, at her own papaya-stained fingers.

"No," Elena said. "Let's just get a plant. Something that's already dead inside."

Sarah laughed. Elena did too, surprised by the sound of it. She unpacked her lunch and ate her papaya while the breakroom clock ticked toward quarter to three, somewhere between grief and something that felt dangerously like beginning.