The Last Living Thing in the Apartment

The notification pinged at 2:47 AM — again. Maya's **iphone** lit up the bedroom with its ghostly blue glow, another message from him asking if they could talk. She'd stopped reading them three days ago, when she realized his texts were just rehearsals for conversations he was too cowardly to have in person.

Her **cat**, Bast, lifted her head from the foot of the bed, yellow eyes judging Maya's sleeplessness. Bast had been Mark's idea, a "practice run" for the family they'd planned to start. Now the cat was the only living thing Maya still bothered to feed.

Maya padded to the kitchen, bare feet cold on the linoleum. The **goldfish** bowl sat on the counter, its single inhabitant circling endlessly in water that needed changing. Mark had won it at a carnival two years ago, some pathetic prize he'd presented like it meant something. "They only have a three-second memory," he'd said, "like they're always living in the present." Maya had found it romantic then. Now she wondered if the fish was lucky — not because it lived in the present, but because it forgot everything that came before.

She watched the goldfish suspend itself in the water, mouth opening and closing in silent desperation, and felt something shift inside her chest. That's what she'd become: a creature in too-small waters, forgetting herself in increments, waiting for someone else to remember she existed.

Her phone buzzed again. This time she looked.

*Can I come over? I brought your things.*

Maya thought about the boxes by the door, half-packed, the way she'd been moving through her days like some **zombie** version of herself — present for nothing, arriving at each moment without having truly lived through the one before. The goldfish rose to the surface, mouth breaking the water in a desperate gasp.

She poured the fish into a mason jar, grabbed her keys, and walked out into the night air. Some things, she realized, were meant to be set free, not kept.

The notification pinged one last time as she dropped the phone into the nearest storm drain.