The Last Thing He Said About Fish

The bottle of vitamin D sat on his nightstand, a daily reminder of the life he was supposed to want—healthy, measured, prescribed. I watched him swallow it dry, like medicine, like penance, like everything else in our carefully curated life together.

'I'm going to play padel,' he said, not asking anymore. The sport was new, expensive, something his colleagues did. I'd stopped being invited along somewhere around the time I stopped caring about his quarterly reviews and the way he rearranged his face for leadership meetings.

'Okay.' I turned back to the cable spaghetti behind the television. Something had been loose for weeks, flickering the screen during the shows we watched separately but together on the couch.

A fox appeared in the garden that afternoon—sleek, improbable, watching me through the glass with knowing yellow eyes. I pressed my palm against the pane. For a moment, I considered opening the door, letting something wild inside. Instead I called Marcus, but he didn't pick up. He was at the club, probably, sweating and laughing and hitting balls against walls that always bounced them back.

Our son's goldfish had died two years ago, flushed by Marcus while I was at work. Jake was seven then; he was ten now, and somehow we'd never replaced it. The empty bowl sat on his dresser, gathering dust like all the things we meant to fix and never did. The story we told ourselves was that we were busy. The truth was longer and quieter.

When Marcus came home, smelling of expensive cologne and exertion, I'd finally fixed the cable. The picture was crisp, sharp, unforgiving.

'Good,' he said, already looking at his phone. 'That's good.'

'I've been thinking about that fish,' I said. The words came out harder than I intended.

He looked up, annoyed. 'What fish?'

'Exactly,' I said.

And there it was—the space where something used to be, the particular shape of what we'd forgotten to keep alive. Outside, the fox was gone. Inside, everything was working perfectly.