The Life Aquatic

The goldfish had been living in that cracked bowl on Marian's nightstand for seven years. Seven years was longer than most of her relationships lasted, longer than she'd stayed at any job, longer than she'd lived in that apartment overlooking the el tracks. Its name was Bill.

Bill had belonged to Sam, her friend from the library where they both worked circ desk shifts. Sam had been the kind of person who collected people—strays, misfits, the quietly desperate—and Marian had been one of them. They'd never dated. Whatever had existed between them had been too careful, too freighted with the possibility of loss to ever risk naming.

Then Sam died. Not dramatically—cancer, slow and ordinary as Sunday Mass. Before the hospital, before the morphine drip and the hushed voices of relatives Marian didn't know, Sam had pressed the bowl into her hands.

"Take Bill," Sam said, his baseball cap pulled low over eyes that were starting to yellow with jaundice. "He's tougher than he looks."

The cap was new. Sam had hated baseball. He'd bought it because his hair was falling out in clumps by then, and he was thirty-four years old and too proud to let the world watch him go bald without permission.

That was two years ago.

Marian sat on the edge of her bed watching Bill swim his endless laps. His scales had lost their metallic sheen. His gills moved slower each week. The water needed changing; she'd been telling herself that for days.

She was thirty-five now. The age Sam would never be. She worked the same job. She dated sometimes—men who reminded her of Sam, men who didn't. None of them stayed. Neither did she.

Bill floated to the surface, his mouth opening and closing in the silent way fish had, like they were perpetually surprised by water itself. Marian pressed her finger to the glass. The barest ripple.

"You and me, Bill," she whispered.

Somewhere in the apartment, a phone was ringing. Probably her mother, probably calling to say she should find someone, settle down, make something of herself before it was too late. The usual script. Marian didn't move.

The fish turned, slow and deliberate, and began another circuit of the bowl. Another day. It was enough.