The Last Goldfish

The goldfish circles his bowl, orange scales catching the morning light—Marvin's final expenditure, a carnival prize won three months before the cancer took him. I haven't had the heart to flush him.

I've learned to bear many things in the eight months since: the deafening silence of this apartment, my mother's careful phone calls, the way my coworkers avoid my eyes in the breakroom. But this fish, with his perpetual motion and memoryless existence, has become something unexpected—a tether to the world of the living.

The oncologist, a gruff bear of a man with hands too large for his delicate work, told me Marvin's suffering would end long before his body understood. He was right. But he couldn't have predicted what would follow: not relief, but this terrible suspension—a life caught between before and after, like breath held too long.

Outside, lightning fractures the June sky, sudden and violent. The goldfish startles, darts to the bottom of his bowl. For a moment, I'm twenty-three again, pressed against Marvin's chest as we counted seconds between flash and thunder. One one thousand. Two one thousand.

I realize I'm still counting.

The storm passes as quickly as it arrived. The fish returns to his endless circling, his small world contained within glass walls. I watch him and understand something about survival: you keep swimming, even when you've forgotten why. Even when you're convinced you've already forgotten everything that matters.

Perhaps memory is overrated. Perhaps it's enough to exist, to move through water, to surface for air.

I drop a pinch of food into the bowl. Marvin's goldfish eats, indifferent to profundity. And I watch him, feeling something shift inside me—not lightning, exactly. Something quieter. Something that might, given enough time, become hope.