The Last Goldfish

Maya walked into her apartment at 8:47 PM, another day reduced to a blur of spreadsheets and meetings she couldn't remember. She felt like a zombie—alive, technically, but moving through her life on automatic pilot, consuming brainlessly, shuffling toward goals she'd stopped believing in years ago.

Her goldfish, Bartholomew, drifted near the glass of his bowl, his orange scales catching the last light of day. She'd won him at a carnival six years ago, a drunken mistake from a weekend she barely recalled. He was supposed to die in weeks. Instead, he'd outlasted her marriage, her mother, her willingness to pretend she enjoyed marketing analytics.

She sprinkled flakes into the water. Bartholomew surfaced, his mouth opening and closing in silent rhythm.

"You and me, buddy," she murmured. "Just bearing it."

That word—bear. It had been haunting her since the phone call from her sister two weeks ago. A black bear had wandered into their hometown, killed two dogs, been tranquilized and relocated. Their mother had been dead eight months by then, but Maya had found herself furious at the bear anyway. It got to just wander into somewhere and disrupt everything. It got to be wild and hungry and catastrophically itself. Meanwhile Maya sat in climate-controlled offices making pivot tables.

She poured a glass of wine, considered the box of antidepressants her doctor had prescribed three months ago. Untouched, sitting in her bathroom cabinet like an acknowledgment she wasn't ready to make.

What if she just—stopped? The zombie worker routine, the carefully curated adulthood, the performance of having it together at thirty-seven while her net worth was negative and her uterus was a ticking clock she couldn't decide whether she wanted to hear or smash.

Bartholomew swam to his plastic castle, disappeared into it, then emerged again.

Maya drank her wine and cried for the first time since the funeral. She cried until her chest ached, until her face was sticky and her eyes burned. She cried for the bear that couldn't help being hungry, for the goldfish that kept swimming in circles, for herself—awake at last, and terrified.

In the morning, she called in sick. Then she called her sister. Then she sat by Bartholomew's bowl and watched the light move across the water, one long, honest day at a time.