The Weight of Swimming

The goldfish was floating sideways when Jack got home from work—belly-up, scales dulling like old copper. Emma stood beside the aquarium in their bedroom, her hand pressed to the glass as if willing life back into the water. They'd bought it on impulse three months ago, after the second IVF failed. Something living that wasn't complicated. Something they could keep alive.

"He's gone," Jack said, setting down his bag. His feet ached. Everything ached lately.

"I know." Emma turned to him, and for the first time in weeks, she looked ready to break. "I keep thinking about what you said. About how some things just aren't meant to be."

Outside, lightning cracked the sky open—summer storm finally breaking the humidity. Rain lashed against the windows like questions demanding entry. A cat yowled somewhere in the alley, that hollow, searching sound that always found its way through walls.

"Do you remember that hike?" Emma asked suddenly. "When we saw the bear cub?"

Jack nodded. They'd been dating six months, up in the Smokies. They'd frozen, watched the mother bear shuffling through brush some thirty feet away, her coat thick and impossibly alive. They'd held hands, hearts hammering against their ribs, terrified and electric. Afterward, they'd tumbled into a motel room and fucked like their lives depended on it. Like they'd survived something together.

"I felt like I'd been granted something," Emma said. "Like I'd been let in on the secret of how precious everything is. That's what I thought when I saw that bear. That I wanted to see everything. I wanted to see everything with you."

She was crying now, silently. Jack crossed the room and pulled her against him. She felt smaller somehow, hollowed out by months of doctors and needles and photographs of other people's children.

"I don't know how to keep doing this," she whispered. "I don't know how to keep swimming when I can't see shore anymore."

The cat cried out again—closer this time. Without speaking, they separated and moved toward the back door, drawn by the instinct that something needed them. When they opened it, a wet calico was crouched beneath the eaves, shivering.

Emma scooped it up without hesitating. The cat pressed into her chest, purring immediately, a tiny engine vibrating through her ribs. Something broken opening up again.

"We're going to try again," Jack said, watching his wife with the cat, with the living thing that had found them. "But not like before. Different. We figure out what's next together. Whatever that looks like."

Emma nodded, holding the cat's gaze. "Okay. But first—flush the fish."

He laughed. It startled them both. The sound of it, the absolute ordinariness of laughter. The storm raged on, and somewhere behind the clouds, the moon kept swimming through darkness, relentless and unseen.