The Last Fair

The carnival lights blurred through Maya's tears as she stood before the sphinx-themed prize booth. The fiberglass creature's painted-on smile mocked her, its riddle already answered: they weren't going to make it.

"You're doing it again," Nate said, coming up behind her. His baseball cap — the one she'd bought him at their first major league game together — was pulled low, hiding his eyes. "That thing where you disappear inside your head."

Maya reached up, her fingers finding the single gray hair at her temple that had appeared six months ago, right around the time the promotion that should have brought them closer instead built a wall between them. "I'm not disappearing. I'm just... remembering."

"Remembering what?" His voice cracked, something she rarely heard anymore.

"The goldfish," she said. "That night at the county fair, five years ago. You won me that goldfish in a plastic bag. We named him Lucky. He died two days later, but for those two days, we were so damn happy."

Nate finally looked at her, really looked at her. "You kept the bowl empty on your dresser for six months after that."

"Because I thought..." Maya stopped. The sphinx seemed to grin wider. "Because I thought if we could keep something alive together, maybe we could keep us alive too."

The carnival noises faded — the distant screams from the roller coaster, the tinny music from the carousel, the murmur of hundreds of people having better nights than they were.

Nate took off his cap. His hair was thinner than she remembered. "You know what's funny? I still have that ticket stub from the baseball game. From our first date."

"You kept it?"

"In my wallet. Behind my license." He stepped closer. "I stopped carrying cash so I wouldn't lose it by accident."

The sphinx's painted eyes seemed to hold the answer to a riddle neither of them had known they were asking.

"Maybe," Maya said, her voice barely audible above the carnival music, "we've been looking at this wrong. Maybe we don't need to keep anything alive. Maybe we just need to stop waiting for it to die."

Nate's hand found hers. His palm was warm, his grip gentle. "You still have that empty fishbowl?"

"It's in the closet."

"Buy you another goldfish?"

Maya laughed, really laughed, for the first time in months. "Only if you promise not to name it Lucky. That was terrible luck."

Behind them, the sphinx continued its silent vigil, its riddle finally solved: some things don't survive by being protected — they survive by being lived.