The Goldfish Won't Notice

The black fedora sat on the closet shelf for three years before she finally moved it to the donation box. His hat, collected from some film set he'd walked off of in 2008, when ambition still smelled like possibility instead of compromise.

Now the apartment echoed differently. The cat — Arthur, a judgmental rescue she'd named after a procrastinated promise to read the classics — paced the hallway at 3 AM, yowling for someone who wasn't coming back. Sarah had always been the one who remembered to feed him, the one whose calm presence kept the household from drifting into entropy.

Marcus stood at the kitchen counter, swallowing his daily vitamin D supplement. The doctor had warned about seasonal affective disorder, as if his malaise could be solved with pharmaceutical precision. As if the hollow feeling in his chest was simply a deficiency, not the accumulated weight of two decades of conversations unsaid, compromises unexamined, the slow erosion of intimacy beneath the comfortable routine of shared existence.

The goldfish — Sarah's parting gift to herself, a splash of life in their newly separate lives — swam in lazy circles on the counter. Bob. An aggressively ordinary name for an aggressively ordinary creature. Marcus found himself transfixed by its stupid, uncomprehending face. Did it remember the previous owner? Did it pine for the upgraded tank in Sarah's new apartment?

"At least someone's getting fed," he muttered, dropping a pinch of food into the bowl.

The phone buzzed. Sarah: "Did you pick up Arthur's prescription?"

He stared at the message, then at the hatless coat rack, the cat weaving through his legs, the fish swimming its endless laps. All these beings, dependent and oblivious. He pressed his thumb against the glass of the fishbowl, and the goldfish nudged it, seeking food or warmth or whatever recognition it could cobble together from the vast stupidity of its existence.

Marcus typed back: "I'll grab it tomorrow."

In the bathroom mirror, his reflection looked like someone he'd once promised never to become. He swallowed another vitamin, even though the bottle said one per day. The label warned about toxicity. He wondered if some things only became poisonous in excess. Love, for instance. Patience. Hope.