The Last Goldfish at Tuesday's

The bar was called Tuesday's, though it was Friday when Marcus first saw her. She sat alone, nursing something bright and orange—probably a cocktail with an umbrella, though the lighting made it impossible to tell. Marcus was three whiskeys deep, bearing the weight of another layoff, another rental hike, another year of his thirties slipping away without consequence.

Her name was Elena. She'd been watching the goldfish in the tank behind the bar for twenty minutes.

"Their memories are seven seconds," she said, without turning around. "Imagine that liberation."

Marcus slid onto the stool beside her. "You ever notice how goldfish in restaurants always look like they're plotting something?"

She laughed, and it was the first genuine thing he'd heard in months. "Maybe they're just wondering why their orange brother keeps disappearing."

The conversation meandered through ex-spouses and dead careers, through the peculiar horror of realizing your parents were right about everything. Elena was thirty-four, a freelance graphic designer who hadn't designed anything since the pandemic. Marcus was thirty-eight, temporarily between purposes.

"We're all zombies," she said, gesturing with her nearly empty glass. "Not the brain-eating kind. The romantic kind. Walking around with holes in our chests where things used to be."

Marcus ordered another round. The bartender looked like he'd rather be literally anywhere else.

"My ex-husband kept comparing me to a bear," Elena said suddenly. "Not the powerful kind. The hibernating kind. Like my depression was just seasonal. Like eventually I'd wake up hungry and ready to be charming again."

Marcus thought about the unemployment orientation he'd attended that morning. The speaker's voice had been so relentlessly upbeat it made him want to scream.

"Maybe bears know something we don't," he said. "Maybe sometimes you need to sleep through the cold parts."

They left together at closing time. Not for sex, but for the kind of human warmth that two frozen people might instinctively seek. Her apartment had a goldfish bowl on the windowsill, empty and dry.

"He died three years ago," she said. "But I keep thinking I should get another one. Start over."

Marcus watched her streetlights flicker across her face, the orange glow making her look simultaneously older and younger than she was.

"Maybe tomorrow," he said.

And for the first time in a long time, tomorrow felt like something that might actually arrive.