The Longest Winter

The goldfish was still alive. Three months after the funeral, and the orange bastard swam in lazy circles, outlasting everyone who actually gave a damn about it.

Elena stood by the above-ground pool, now covered in moss and debris. She wore my old baseball cap—the one I'd left on the porch railing the night she told me she was leaving. The brim was curled, the fabric sun-bleached. It looked wrong on her.

"Your mother loved this thing," she said, gesturing at the pool with a cigarette she'd bummed from my brother. "Used to swim laps every morning until her knees gave out."

I didn't remind her that my mother had hated swimming. That she'd only bought the house because it came with the pool, and she'd spent ten years complaining about the maintenance.

"You kept it," I said, instead of saying what I really wanted to—that she had no right to wear my hat, no right to stand in my childhood backyard looking like she belonged there.

"Kept what?"

"The fish."

Elena exhaled smoke that drifted toward the dying garden. "Seemed cruel, somehow. To just... let it go."

We'd met running. The 2019 marathon, mile 18, when I'd cramped up and she'd slowed her pace to help me stretch. We'd crossed the finish line together. Six months later, she moved in. Two years after that, she moved out. The goldfish had been a consolation prize from the pet store where she worked briefly—she'd brought it home the day after the clinic called with the negative pregnancy results.

"I'm seeing someone," she said, so casually I almost missed it.

The air left my chest like a physical blow. It had been eight months. I had no right to this pain. I'd been the one who couldn't do it anymore—the long silences, the nights she'd come home smelling like other people's cologne, the way she'd look through me instead of at me.

"That's," I managed. "That's good."

"He's a therapist," she added, like that would mean something to me. "He thinks I need closure."

The closure of a door that had been swinging in the wind for almost a year.

"So you came back for the fish?" My voice sounded foreign to my own ears.

She turned to me then, really looked at me. Her eyes were the same gray as the winter sky. "I came back to see if there was anything left worth coming back for."

The goldfish broke the surface, gulping air.

"There isn't," I said.

"No," she agreed. "There isn't."

She took off the hat and placed it on the pool's edge. Behind us, somewhere in the distance, a baseball game crackled through a neighbor's radio—the sound of summer in the dead of March. She walked to her car without looking back.

I watched until her taillights disappeared around the corner. Then I went inside, found the fish food, and sprinkled too much into the bowl. The fish ate greedily, indifferent to everything.