The Leaving Party

The goldfish hadn't been fed in three days. Ellie watched it circles its bowl on her desk, its orange scales dull in the fluorescent light. Tomorrow, someone else would sit here. Someone else would remember to drop those flakes in at noon.

"Hey, you coming?" Brad leaned against her doorframe, that familiar looseness in his posture that used to make her stomach drop. Now it just made her tired.

"In a minute."

"Your papaya's getting warm," he said, nodding toward her desk. "Tina brought it special. From her garden."

Tina's garden. As if papaya grew in suburban Chicago. As if any of this was genuine.

Ellie picked up the fruit, its skin mottled yellow-green, soft as a bruise. She'd started sleeping with Brad six months ago, after the holiday party, after too much cheap wine and his hand brushing her waist in the elevator. Now he was staying. She was leaving. The mathematics of it felt almost violent.

"You sure about this?" Brad asked, stepping closer. His cologne drifted over her—sandalwood, the same scent she'd smelled on her husband's shirts for twelve years before she found the texts.

She set the papaya down. "It's just a job, Brad."

"Is it?"

His wedding ring caught the light. Her own finger felt bare where she'd stopped wearing hers two years ago, though she and Mark never filed the papers. Some separations were slower than others. Some were just endless.

On the corner of her desk sat Mark's fedora, the one he'd left behind when he moved out. She should have thrown it away. Instead, she'd kept it there like evidence. Like she was still waiting for him to walk back through the door and say it had all been some terrible mistake.

The goldfish surfaced, mouth opening and closing in silent repetition.

"What happens to him?" she asked.

"Who?"

"The fish."

Brad shrugged. "Probably flush it. Corporate policy."

Of course. Of course they would.

Ellie reached into the bowl, her fingers closing around the slippery body. The goldfish thrashed against her palm, a desperate, liquid heartbeat. She dropped it into the water glass she'd filled that morning.

"What are you doing?"

"Saving something," she said, and walked out of the office she'd worked in for seven years, the man she'd almost destroyed her marriage for, the husband she couldn't let go of, and the papaya sitting on her desk like some rotting metaphor for all the sweet things that turn bitter if you wait too long.

The goldfish swam in lazy circles in her passenger seat as she drove toward the lake, toward whatever came next, while somewhere behind her, the office party continued without her.