The Hat, The Fish, The Walking Dead

The goldfish had been swimming in the same figure-eight pattern for three years. Longer than most of my relationships, certainly longer than my marriage. Not that the marriage was over—it was worse than that. It was a zombie. Undead. Still moving through the rooms of our brownstone, still making coffee and asking about my day, but whatever had animated us in the beginning had rotted away somewhere between the mortgage refinance and my father's funeral.

I found myself at a pet store at 2 AM on a Tuesday, staring at tanks of fluorescent fish. The fluorescent lights hummed. A clerk with dark circles under his eyes asked if I needed help.

"Just looking," I said, which is what I'd been saying for six months.

I bought a betta fish—violent, solitary, beautiful—and named it Marcus after my husband. Marcus-at-home was asleep when I returned. Or pretending to be. We'd both gotten good at pretending.

Wednesday morning, I pulled the gray fedora from the back of my closet. I hadn't worn it since before law school, since before I became the person who wore sensible shoes and carried a briefcase that weighed as much as a small child. The person who'd once driven to New Orleans on a whim, who'd danced on tables in Seville, who'd thought love might actually be enough.

The hat didn't fit anymore. My head had grown, or the hat had shrunk, or I'd simply become someone else entirely.

"Nice hat," Marcus said over breakfast, without looking up from his phone.

I wore it to work anyway. Let them stare. Let my senior partner ask what the hell I thought I was doing. I was thirty-eight years old and I'd forgotten how to be alive. That was the real tragedy—not that my marriage had died, but that I'd let it walk around wearing my face, eating my food, sleeping in my bed.

The goldfish—I mean Marcus-the-fish—was dead when I got home. Floating near the plastic fern. I flushed him down the toilet without ceremony.

I took off the hat and looked in the mirror. The woman staring back had circles under her eyes. Hadn't felt anything real in years. Was she dead too?

She pressed her hand against the glass. "I'm still here," she whispered.

Somewhere, a clock struck midnight. The zombie opened her eyes and began to remember how to breathe.