The Last Lightning Strike

Margaret watched the goldfish circle its bowl, its orange scales catching the dying light of their thirty-fifth anniversary dinner. The candle between them had burned down to a puddle, much like the conversation.

'You're not listening,' David said, not for the first time.

'I am,' she said, though she wasn't. She was thinking about the goldfish—how her daughter had left it behind when she moved out last year, how it kept swimming despite everything.

Outside, lightning cracked the sky in half. The storm had been building all day, the air thick with unsaid things.

'I met someone,' David said, and Margaret felt the words like a physical blow. Not surprising, after all these months of his late nights and careful silences, but final in a way nothing else had been.

She took a slice of orange from the fruit bowl, peeling it slowly. The citrus scent was sharp, clean—too clean for what was happening between them.

'Is she young?' Margaret asked, and David's hesitation was answer enough.

The goldfish swam to the surface, its mouth opening and closing in the silence.

'I tried,' David said, and she recognized the truth in it. They both had. Marriage was mostly trying, most of the time. Sometimes trying wasn't enough.

'What happens to the fish?' Margaret asked.

'The—what?'

'The goldfish. Emma's fish. Who gets it in the divorce?'

David stared at her. Lightning flashed again, illuminating the gray in his hair, the lines around his eyes she'd once loved tracing with her fingers.

'You can have it,' he said.

Margaret nodded. She'd keep the fish. She'd keep the house. She'd keep the life they'd built, hollowed out though it was. Some things you fought for. Some things you just... kept.

Outside, the sky opened. Rain lashed against the windows, drowning everything else out. Margaret finished her orange section by section, and neither of them spoke again that night.