The Last Broadcast

The goldfish had been watching him for three years. Its orange scales flashed in the blue light of the television screen, the only illumination in Mark's apartment. He'd bought the fish on a whim—the same day Sarah moved out, leaving him with too much space and not enough noise.

Now the fish was dying, floating sideways in the cloudy water, its gills moving in shallow, desperate gasps.

Mark pressed the remote until his thumb hurt. The cable had been cut yesterday—another expense he couldn't justify since the layoff. But the static on channel 3 still came through, a gray snowstorm of white noise that filled the terrible quiet.

'You're not going to make it, are you?' he whispered to the bowl.

The phone buzzed. Elena.

He hadn't spoken to his oldest friend in six months, not since the intervention where she'd told him he was drinking himself into an early grave. He'd stopped drinking, mostly. Stopped doing much of anything.

The fish rolled completely upside down. Mark felt something crack open in his chest—a sudden lightning strike of grief for something that had lived in a glass box on his coffee table.

He picked up the phone.

'I think I need help,' he said.

Elena was there in twenty minutes. She found him kneeling beside the fish bowl, tears cutting tracks through three days of stubble.

'That's a hell of a goldfish,' she said softly, dropping to the floor beside him. 'Three years? That's forever in fish time.'

'More forever than I've had lately,' he said.

They flushed the fish together. Elena made coffee while Mark ran the water, watched the orange scales disappear into the city's pipes, another small life returning to the water that had birthed it.

'We'll get you a new one,' she said, as if this was something people did. 'Or maybe something bigger. Something that can't live in a bowl.'

'No,' Mark said, turning off the faucet. 'I think I'm done with things that can't swim away.'

Elena's apartment had a balcony with a view of the skyline. They stood there in the warm June air, watching lightning stitch the clouds above the river, a storm coming in from the west.

'You could stay here,' she said. 'Until you figure out what's next.'

'Maybe I don't need to figure it out,' Mark said. 'Maybe I just need to not be alone.'

Elena handed him a beer, then opened one for herself. 'Well,' she said, clinking the bottle against his. 'You're not alone tonight.'

Below them, the city hummed its electric song, millions of lives tangled together in the dark.