The Goldfish Years

Margaret stood at the edge of the apartment complex pool at 2 AM, cigarette burning between her fingers. The water was still, black glass reflecting the moon. She'd been coming here every night since David moved out—three months of sleeplessness and swimming pool contemplation.

She felt like a zombie these days, moving through her workdays at the insurance firm with that characteristic shuffle, eyes glazed, processing claims but never really seeing them. Her colleagues probably thought she was just another middle-aged woman burning out. They didn't know she was hollowing out from the inside.

The goldfish bowl sat on her nightstand at home. David had won it at a carnival during their first year together, that summer when everything felt possible. Now it was just Margaret and three increasingly sluggish fish swimming in lazy circles, their three-second memories an unwitting joke about how she couldn't seem to hold onto anything good.

Running had been David's thing. Marathon training at dawn, those lean legs slicing through pavement. Margaret had tried it once, ended up wheezing and walking, and he'd laughed—not meanly, but with that gentle certainty that they were different creatures meant for different velocities. Now she sometimes found herself running without realizing it, down supermarket aisles, away from conversations, through dreams where she couldn't escape something she couldn't name.

A splash broke her reverie. Someone else in the pool. No—a body, floating face-up. Margaret's heart seized. Then the figure moved, arms doing a slow backstroke. Alive.

"Can't sleep either?" a woman's voice called.

Margaret recognized Elena from 4B, recently divorced, perpetually gardening in her bathrobe. "No," Margaret said. "You?"

"Zombie hours," Elena said, treading water. "We're all just swimming in circles anyway. Might as well do it literally."

Margaret flicked her cigarette into the ash bucket. She thought of the goldfish, of David running toward someone else, of all the nights she'd spent haunting the edge of this pool.

"Mind if I join you?" she asked.

Elena's laugh rippled across the water. "Company's better than swimming alone."

As Margaret lowered herself into the cool dark, something inside her—something frozen and dormant—finally began to thaw.