The Loneliness of Creatures

Elena stood in the veterinary clinic waiting room, the air thick with antiseptic and grief. At forty-two, she'd thought she was too old for the kind of love that required saying goodbye, but there she was, her father's ancient dog—a lab mix named Bear—resting his gray muzzle on her knee. The vet had just given them two weeks, maybe three.

"You should have seen him," her father had told her once, drunk and sentimental at Christmas. "When your mother left, that dog slept by your bedroom door for three years. Every single night."

Outside the clinic, a cat wound itself around her legs as she walked to her car. Stray, collarless, perfectly calibrated to locate exactly the person who couldn't take in another creature. Elena stepped over it, got in her Volvo, and drove home to the empty house she'd inherited when her father moved into assisted living.

In the kitchen, she fed the goldfish—her daughter's, left behind during the divorce two years ago. The girl was nineteen now, somewhere in Europe, presumably not thinking about the fish that had somehow survived three years of sporadic feeding and dirty tank water. Elena watched it surface, gulp, sink. Something about its blind persistence made her want to cry.

Her phone buzzed. Marcus from HR, asking if she'd be free for dinner next week. She'd been avoiding him for months—he was kind, divorced, had a dog he talked about too much. The kind of man who'd probably remember to feed the fish.

"I don't know," she'd told him last time they'd run into each other by the elevators. "I'm still—I don't know if I'm ready."

"For what?" he'd asked, and she hadn't had an answer.

She went into the garage and found the box of her father's things she'd meant to sort through months ago. Old photographs, receipts, a newspaper clipping from 1989: a local bull named Hercules had won first prize at the county fair. Her father stood next to it, young and grinning, one hand on the animal's massive shoulder. She'd never known he'd shown animals. Had never known anything about him before he was someone's father.

The truth was, Elena thought, staring at the photograph, that she'd spent her entire life surrounded by creatures who loved her better than she'd loved them back. The dog who'd waited at doors, the daughter she'd let slip away, the men she'd been too scared to let close.

She picked up her phone and found Marcus's message.

"Yes," she typed. "Dinner would be nice."

The goldfish surfaced, mouth opening to the surface of the water. Elena reached into the tank and dropped in more flakes than necessary. Some things, she decided, you didn't have to save to still care about. Some things you just learned to feed.