The Last Goldfish

Elena had been moving like a zombie for three months since David left, but tonight felt different. The apartment was too quiet, the only sound the gentle hum of the refrigerator and the occasional bubble from the goldfish bowl on the counter. She'd bought Finnegan on their first anniversary, a joke about how they'd never remember to feed anything more demanding, and somehow the fish had outlasted their marriage.

She stood in front of the bathroom mirror, scissors in hand. Her hair had always been David's favorite — long, dark, tumbling down her back. He'd loved running his fingers through it in bed, loved how it looked spilled across his pillow on mornings when he actually stayed over. "Your hair is your crown," he'd said, the first time he'd seen her without makeup, fresh from a shower and feeling raw and exposed. She'd believed him then.

The cable bill sat unpaid on the counter, another reminder of how thoroughly she'd unraveled. She hadn't watched television since he left. The silence was preferable to the half-empty apartment, to the ghost of his laughter in the living room, to the way the couch still sagged on his side.

Her phone buzzed. David's name lit up the screen.

"Can we talk?" he asked when she answered. "I've been thinking about you."

Elena watched Finnegan swim lazy circles in his bowl, oblivious to the way her heart was hammering against her ribs. "I'm not the person you remember," she said, and realized it was true.

"You're being dramatic, El. It's been three months."

"It's been three months of moving through my life like I'm already dead, David. Three months of paying the cable bill alone, of talking to a fish because the silence is killing me, of sleeping in the middle of the bed because I forgot how to take up space."

She could hear him breathing on the other end. He didn't understand. He'd never understood how completely he'd consumed her, how she'd become an extension of his desires rather than her own person.

"I'm coming over," he said.

"Don't."

"Elena—"

"I'm cutting my hair," she told him, and the scissors glinted under the bathroom lights. "I'm starting over. I don't know what that looks like yet, but I know it doesn't include you."

The first lock fell into the sink, dark and heavy. She kept cutting, sobbing now, the phone forgotten on the counter as David's voice became distant, meaningless. When it was over — chin-length, choppy, uneven — she felt lighter somehow, as if she'd been carrying something she hadn't known how to name.

Finnegan swam to the front of his bowl and stared at her. She laughed, really laughed, for the first time in months.

"Well," she said to the fish. "I guess it's just us now."

She poured herself a glass of wine and turned on the television for the first time since he'd left. The cable news flickered across the screen — wars, disasters, the endless parade of human suffering — and she felt strangely calm. She wasn't a zombie anymore. She was just a woman with short hair, a goldfish, and a life she was going to figure out how to live.