The Last Vitamin

The prenatal vitamins sat on the counter, ninety days' worth of hope reduced to biological dust. Sarah flushed them one by one, watching the capsules dissolve like her marriage.

Her goldfish, won during a brief delirium of optimism at a county fair, circled his bowl with the relentless patience of the abandoned. Five years of feeding flakes to something that couldn't remember her name three seconds later. A metaphor, if she'd ever needed one shoved in her face.

She began swimming at 5 AM because insomnia felt better with chlorine. The community pool's harsh fluorescent lights revealed everything: her body's betrayal, the grey roots she stopped hiding, the way her stroke had grown jagged, desperate. Laps became arithmetic—back and forth, like counting sorrows.

"Sarah, please."

Mark had said that word thirty times in their final conversation, while the baseball game murmured from the television, crowd noise swelling like a tide. He'd chosen that moment, between innings, to tell her he'd re-enlisted. The military. The one thing they'd promised each other they'd never return to.

"You can't just leave me here."

"I already did."

The goldfish was still swimming when she got home from the pool, as if nothing had changed. As if the oxygen in the water wasn't depleting, as if her hands weren't shaking as she reached for his food. Some creatures lived their entire lives in ten gallons of water, never knowing there was an ocean.

That afternoon, she drove to the pet store.

"What kind of tank does he need?" she asked the teenager with stretched ears and bored eyes.

"Goldfish? They get big. Need at least twenty gallons. More, if you want them happy."

Twenty gallons. She'd kept him in a prison his whole life and called it love.

At home, she poured the goldfish into a mixing bowl and drove to the pond behind the old baseball fields where they used to sit on bleachers and drink warm beer, watching Little League games neither of them cared about. The water was murky with duckweed and secrets.

"Go," she whispered, and tipped the bowl.

The goldfish hung suspended for a moment, silver flash against the dark water, then vanished into depths she couldn't follow. Swimming at last.