The Last Living Thing

The vitamins sat on the counter in their orange plastic bottle, a thirty-day supply of optimism she'd purchased three months ago. She still took them every morning, this ritual of swallowing something that promised to make her whole again, even as David moved through their apartment like a ghost inhabiting the body of a man she'd once loved.

He was there, in the technical sense—sitting on the couch, scrolling through his phone, eating the dinners she still cooked out of habit. But somewhere in the past year, something had hollowed him out. Maybe it was the layoffs at his firm, the way his team had been picked off one by one until he was the last one standing, doing the work of three men for the same salary. He'd become a zombie, really—not the movie kind with their clumsy hunger, but something worse: a man who'd forgotten how to want anything.

"How was your day?" she asked him, the question automatic, meaningless.

"Fine," he said, not looking up from his screen. "You buy more vitamins?"

"I still have half a bottle."

"Oh."

Her hair was starting to fall out. She found it in the shower drain, in her brush, on her pillow in the morning. The doctor said it was stress, prescribed something that cost more than her monthly subway pass. She wondered if David would notice if she shaved it all off, if she arrived at dinner bald as an egg. He probably wouldn't—not anymore.

The only thing that still felt alive in their apartment was the goldfish she'd bought on impulse from a bodega on the way home from work one Tuesday. It swam in its too-small bowl on the windowsill, orange against the glass, and sometimes she sat with it for hours, watching its mouth open and close, open and close, this tiny creature that somehow kept going in its too-small world.

"We should get a bigger tank," David said one evening, the first thing he'd said that wasn't fine or okay or I don't care in weeks.

She stared at him. "What?"

"The goldfish. It's going to outgrow that bowl. That's what happens, right? They keep growing?"

She felt something crack open in her chest. "You've been thinking about the fish?"

"I've been thinking about a lot of things." He finally set down his phone. "I'm sorry, Maya. I'm sorry I've been... wherever I've been."

The goldfish swam to the front of its bowl, mouth opening, and she reached across the table and took David's hand, his palm warm against hers, and for the first time in months, she felt something like hope, small and fragile, swimming through the hollow spaces of their life together.