The Peripheral Friend

Marcus had been feeding the goldfish for three weeks since Elena's funeral, though he wasn't sure why. They weren't his fish. They weren't really his apartment either. But Elena had named him executor, and her will had been characteristically vague—just a note saying "take care of things" in her careless handwriting.

The sphinx cat, Bast, watched him from its perch on the windowsill, hairless and alien in the afternoon light. It regarded Marcus with the same enigmatic gaze Elena had favored—judgment without explanation, silence pregnant with things unsaid. They'd been something more than friends, something less than lovers, a gray area where they'd both camped for seven comfortable, cowardly years.

"What are you looking at?" Marcus asked the cat. It blinked slowly.

The largest goldfish, a metallic orange specimen Elena had called "Sunshine," floated sideways near the surface. Marcus had Googled it: swim bladder disease, age-related decline. They didn't live forever. Neither did sphinx cats. Neither did the women who collected them like emotional proxies.

He remembered the last time he'd seen Elena, two weeks before her stroke. They'd met at their usual café, and she'd asked, "Are you happy, Marcus?" He'd made some joke about work. She'd studied him with that sphinx-like silence, eyes holding something he hadn't recognized then. Grief? Regret? The knowledge that she'd already begun saying goodbye to everyone she'd kept at arm's length?

"You're a terrible friend," he told the dead woman's empty room.

The goldfish stirred, its gills fluttering with weak determination. Marcus netted it gently, transferred it to a bowl, and carried it outside. Elena's apartment complex had a small ornamental pond, unnecessary landscaping for tenants who mostly kept to themselves.

"Better odds out here," he whispered, lowering the bowl into the water. Sunshine flicked its tail once, then vanished into the murk.

Back inside, Bast meowed—imperious, demanding. Marcus fed the cat, wiped down the counter, and set Elena's keys on the counter for the new tenant. He'd never been a friend, not truly. He'd been someone she'd kept on the periphery, like her books, her plants, her fish. All things that required care but not intimacy.

He locked the door and walked away, understanding at last what Elena's sphinx-like silences had meant all along: some people collect companions the way they collect art—beautiful to look at, easier observed than truly known.