The Last Goldfish

The cable had been out for three hours when Maya finally looked up from her phone.

"He's not moving," she said.

Ethan glanced at the bowl on the bookshelf. The goldfish—Bernard, they'd called him on some whimsical Tuesday five years ago—floated at an odd angle, gills barely fluttering. An existential crisis in ten gallons of water.

"He's probably sleeping," Ethan said, not looking up from his laptop. The presentation for tomorrow's merger was due at midnight, and he'd been rewriting the same paragraph since dinner.

"Goldfish don't sleep like that."

Maya stood up, her bare feet soundless on the hardwood. She'd cut her hair last week—a sharp, angular bob that made her look like someone he didn't quite recognize yet. Someone who might leave.

"Everything dies, Maya. Even the things we thought were permanent."

The silence stretched between them, thicker than the humidity of the July evening. She went to the kitchen, returned with a slice of papaya on a white plate. The fruit's orange flesh glowed in the gray light filtering through the blinds.

"My mother used to say papaya was for fertility," she said, not looking at him. "She ate it every morning for a year before she got pregnant with me."

Ethan finally closed his laptop. "Is this about us again?"

"Bernard outlived our last fight. He outlived my promotion, and your mother's surgery, and that month we pretended everything was fine." She took a bite of the papaya, juice catching on her lip. "Maybe he's just tired."

Ethan stood and walked to the fishbowl. Inside, Bernard's golden scales caught what little light remained in the room. A tiny creature that had somehow become the tether between two people who'd forgotten how to talk about anything real.

"Remember when we bought him?" Ethan said quietly. "We were at that street fair, and you said you wanted something that would last longer than your apartment lease."

"I was twenty-three," Maya said. "I believed in permanence then."

"And now?"

She swallowed. "Now I believe in cable outages and dead fish and the way you haven't touched me in six weeks."

Bernard stirred suddenly, a flash of gold in the murky water, swimming upright again. Both of them exhaled.

"He made it," Ethan said.

"For now." Maya set down the papaya, crossed to where he stood, and took his hand. "But we should probably talk about the other things. Before they float to the surface too."

Behind them, the cable box flickered to life. Neither of them turned to look.