The LastThing She Said

The third goldfish died on a Tuesday, which felt appropriate somehow. Mark stared at the orange speck floating at the top of the bowl, another tiny life he'd failed to sustain. His wife had bought the first one after the miscarriage, something living to care for when they'd failed at creating life themselves. Now Sarah was gone too—left six months ago with a suitcase and a promise she'd be back for the rest of her books. She never returned.

He felt like a **zombie** moving through the days. Not the pop-culture kind hungering for brains, but something worse: the walking dead version of himself that went to work, answered emails, nodded in meetings, all while hollowed out by grief he couldn't name to his coworkers. They'd stopped asking how he was doing somewhere around month four.

His **iPhone** buzzed with a notification from Sarah. Not a text—a shared album update. She'd posted photos from somewhere with turquoise water, her arm around someone new. He shouldn't look. He should delete the album. He should block her number. Instead he opened it, studied the stranger's hand on her shoulder, the way she leaned into a touch that wasn't his.

The grief hit differently than before. Sharp instead of dull. He sank to the kitchen floor, phone clutched in one hand, the fish net in the other.

"You know," he said aloud to the dead fish, "she used to say you had a three-second memory. Like forgetting would be a gift."

He flushed the goldfish without ceremony, watched it spiral away. Then he opened Sarah's shared album and pressed delete. Not the photos—those were backed up somewhere else probably—but the connection itself. The tether that kept him checking, waiting, hoping.

The zombie sat up a little straighter. Not healed, not whole, but done with waiting for someone who wasn't coming back. Done with being the man who checked his phone first thing every morning and last thing every night. He stood up, rinsed the fish bowl under the tap, and put it in the trash can beside the empty heartbreak he'd been carrying around like luggage.

Tomorrow he'd buy a plant. Something harder to kill. Something that required showing up for something, even if it was just himself.