The Last Goodbye

Martha stood in the center of what used to be their living room, cardboard boxes stacked like gravestones around her. The **hat** — that ridiculous fedora David had worn to their wedding, the one she'd secretly loathed and publicly adored — rested atop the highest box. She lifted it, fingers tracing the sweat-stained band where he'd written his phone number in fading ink, drunk on something stronger than champagne.

Three weeks after the funeral, she was still drowning in the logistics of undoing a life together. The apartment hummed with the silence of things left unsaid. Outside, **lightning** fractured the summer sky, illuminating dust motes dancing in the gloom like trapped memories.

"You're keeping it, then?" her sister asked from the doorway, not looking up from her phone.

Martha turned to the fishbowl on the windowsill. The **goldfish** — one of David's final impulse buys, a living creature that required more care than either of them had been willing to give — swam in endless circles, its orange scales catching the flash of another storm front. He'd named it Aristotle, because he thought giving a pet fish a philosopher's name made him less of a cliché.

"He was alive when David died," Martha said. "That has to count for something."

Her sister scoffed. "It's a fish, Martha. It lives in its own filth and forgets everything every three seconds. It's not symbolic."

But Martha remembered David in the hospital, his eyes as round and glassy as that bowl, his memory swimming in and out like a frightened fish. She remembered his final coherent request: "Don't flush Aristotle."

The storm broke then, thunder shaking the windows, and Martha placed the fedora on her head. It was too big, slipping down over her eyes, smelling of cedar and David's ridiculous hair product. She looked ridiculous and she felt, for the first time in weeks, like she might survive this.

"I'm keeping the fish," she said, "because remembering is harder than forgetting. But I'm doing both anyway."

Outside, lightning struck again, and for a moment, everything was illuminated.