The Ones We Keep

The goldfish died three days after the positive test turned negative. Marcus found it floating while I was at work, its orange scales dull against the glass, and flushed it before I got home. He said it was a mercy—that it was suffering anyway. I think he just didn't want me staring at another living thing that couldn't seem to stay alive in this house.

Now the empty bowl sits on our bedside table, and I find myself swimming through the space between sleep and waking, reaching for something that's no longer there.

The dog died in February, sudden and violent—a stroke that took him before we could say goodbye. We'd had Barnaby for twelve years. He was the closest thing to practice we'd allowed ourselves, a dry run at the family we kept postponing through grad school, through promotions, through "one more year" of just us. When the vet handed us his collar, Marcus had sobbed against my shoulder in the parking lot, saying we were finally free to travel, to live spontaneously. I'd stared at his empty leash in my hands and wondered why freedom felt so much like loss.

Tonight, the cable is out again—the third time this week—and the silence between us is deafening. Marcus is scrolling through his phone in the armchair, blue light washing over his face. The television screen shows our warped reflections, two people sitting on opposite ends of a beige couch, not touching.

"We could talk," I say, and the words feel foreign in my mouth.

He glances up, then back at his phone. "About what?"

About how I stopped swimming two months ago because the locker room smells too much like chlorinated loneliness. About how I lied to my sister when she asked if we're still trying. About how the goldfish wasn't suffering—it was just swimming in circles, waiting for someone to notice it had stopped moving forward.

"Nothing," I say, turning toward the dark window where our ghosts drift past, silent and patient, waiting to be fed.