The Silent Apartment

The goldfish floated sideways in the bowl, its orange scales dulling as if the color had been drained from it by the same slow erosion that had emptied our marriage. Sarah watched it with the same disaffected stare she'd given me for months, her phone glowing in her hand as she scrolled through someone else's life.

"It's dying," I said.

"Everything dies, Mark." She didn't look up. "Even the things you think won't."

The cable had been cut three days ago—a petty act of financial warfare, my contribution to this cold war we'd been waging since winter. Now the apartment was unnaturally quiet, filled only with the refrigerator's hum and the dog's rhythmic breathing from where he lay sprawled on Sarah's yoga mat. Barnaby, who'd once been *our* dog, now looked at me with something uncomfortably close to pity.

I walked to the window. On the fire escape, someone had abandoned a sphinx statue—tacky, faux-stone, one ear chipped off. It watched the street with an inscrutable smile, like it knew something we didn't about the ruins of ordinary lives. Its riddle wasn't written in stone; it was etched into the silence between Sarah and me, into the separate beds we'd stopped pretending were temporary.

"Your papaya's rotting on the counter," she said finally, not looking up from her phone. "Fruit flies everywhere."

"I'll get to it."

"You always say that."

I turned to face her. The papaya sat in a ceramic bowl, its once-vibrant orange flesh collapsing into brown fermentation, sweet smell turning sickly. We'd bought it together last week, in that fragile moment when we'd tried, one more time, to be the people who still shopped for exotic fruit on Sundays.

"Remember when we thought marriage was forever?" I asked.

She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "We were twenty-two. We thought we'd be different. We thought we'd beat the odds."

The goldfish jerked once, a final rebellion against its bowl, then went still.

"That's it then," Sarah said, standing up. She walked to the door, Barnaby lifting his head to watch her. "I'm going to my mother's. Don't wait up."

The door clicked shut behind her. I stood alone in our apartment with a dead goldfish, a rotting papaya, a dog who pitied me, and a sphinx on the fire escape that knew better than any of us how this story would end.