The Last Time We Spoke of Fish

Sarah stood by the tank, watching the goldfish—she'd named him Bartholomew, absurdly—swim his endless laps. He'd been running the same three inches of acrylic for five years, just as she and Mark had been running in circles for seven. The apartment was half-packed, boxes stacked like accusations in the hallway.

"You're taking him?" Mark asked from the doorway. He looked wrong in their bedroom now, like a word from another language grafted into this sentence.

"He was my Valentine's gift. From you. Year three."

"I remember." The weight of that year hung between them—the year Mark's mother died, the year Sarah miscarried, the year they stopped speaking in anything other than logistics and grievances. "I just thought, with the move..."

"I'll take him." Outside, lightning fractured the sky, a sudden white crack that made Bartholomew dart to the bottom of his tank. The storm had been threatening all day, the air thick and electric, much like the silence that had settled between them after last night's conversation. Or confrontation. Or whatever you called it when someone finally said the things they'd been swallowing for years.

"I meant what I said," Mark said quietly.

"I know." She turned to face him. "That's the problem."

"Sarah—"

"No, don't." She felt something brittle and dangerous opening in her chest, like a door that had been sealed too long. "You want to try again. You want counseling. You want to believe that seven years of two people drifting apart can be fixed with date nights and communication exercises. But Mark—we're not drifting. We're running. We've been running from this moment for years, and I'm tired."

The goldfish surfaced, gulping at the surface, his orange scales catching the lightning-flash through the window. A creature of such limited memory, she thought bitterly. Lucky him.

"I love you," he said, and it sounded like a question.

"I know. And that's worse." She picked up the fishbowl, the water sloshing gently. "I'll send you the forwarding address."

When she left, Mark was still standing in the doorway, and Bartholomew was still swimming his endless circles, and outside the lightning finally broke the sky open, rain washing the city clean.