The Goldfish Pool

The betting pool started as a joke. Seven dollars from each person in accounting, a spreadsheet on the shared drive, and a question: When would the goldfish die?

It was just a comet-tailed goldfish, barely two inches long, swimming endless circles in a bowl on Marcus's desk. Marcus had bought it on a whim during his divorce. Something alive, he'd said. Something that needs me.

"June twelfth," Sarah said, tapping her cigarette against the ashtray. We were sitting by the apartment complex pool at midnight, the water reflecting the moon like bruised silk. Sarah was my oldest friend in the city, the kind of friend who knew your failures better than you did.

"That's optimistic," I said. "That thing's been alive for three years. It's immortal."

"Everything dies, Elena." Sarah's voice had that edge it got when she'd been drinking. "Even the things you think won't."

I'd picked July fourth. Independence Day. The irony appealed to me.

The goldfish outlived Marcus's layoff. It outlived the restructuring that took half the department. It swam its relentless laps while the betting pool grew to three hundred dollars, while Sarah's marriage crumbled, while I stopped calling my mother.

Tonight, Sarah called me at 2 AM. "Come over. The fish is floating."

Marcus's apartment was dark except for the desk lamp. The goldfish bobbed near the surface, its gills moving in slow, labored gasps. Sarah sat on the floor, watching it.

"I need this money," she said softly. "I'm leaving him."

The divorce papers had been sitting on her kitchen table for months.

The goldfish twitched once, then stilled. The water caught the lamp's light, turning the stillness into something almost sacred.

Sarah reached into the bowl. I expected her to scoop it out, flush it. Instead she touched the water with one finger, creating a single ripple that broke the fish's reflection.

"July fourth," I said. "I win."

"Take it," she said. "Take the whole damn pool."

She walked out, leaving me alone with the dead fish and three hundred dollars' worth of other people's calculated losses.

The spreadsheet is still on my computer. I never deleted it. Sometimes I open it and look at the dates we'd chosen, all those predictions about something we thought mattered. Sarah's in Portland now. Marcus remarried. The bowl sits on my desk, empty.

I keep meaning to buy another fish. Something alive. Something that needs me.