Three Funerals

Marcus moved through the apartment like a zombie — not the flesh-eating kind from movies, but the worse sort: the living dead who shuffle through offices and grocery stores, hollowed out by something that doesn't show on MRI scans. Six months after Sarah's funeral, he still caught himself setting the table for two.

Barnaby, their elderly golden retriever, had stopped waiting by the door. The dog understood before Marcus did. Some mornings Marcus would find Barnaby staring at Sarah's favorite armchair, that specific canine head-tilt of confusion, then a soft whine as the dog remembered again. It was the re-learning that broke Marcus's heart every single time.

"We're both just waiting now, aren't we?" Marcus asked, pouring coffee into the mug Sarah had given him for his fortieth birthday — WORLD'S OKAYEST DAD, it read, which had made them both laugh because they'd been trying to conceive for seven years.

Barnaby's answer was a sigh, the exhale of a creature who had loved and lost and was too old to start again.

The only truly uncomplicated thing left was the goldfish — a carnival prize their niece had abandoned in their care three years ago. Marcus found himself standing in front of the tank more often, watching the orange comet carve endless circles in murky water. He'd started feeding it twice a day, then three times. The fish didn't ask anything of him. It didn't carry the weight of a marriage cut short or plans made and abandoned. It just swam.

When Barnaby died on a Tuesday, Marcus didn't cry. He arranged the burial in the backyard alongside Sarah's rosebushes. He dug until his hands blistered, a physical task that demanded nothing from his heart. The hole was deep. The dirt was heavy.

That evening, he sat before the fish tank, a glass of wine untouched on the table, the apartment silent in a way it hadn't been since the diagnosis.

"Just us," he said to the goldfish.

The fish surfaced, mouth opening and closing in that silent perpetual request. Marcus watched it float there, suspended in its small universe, and something cracked open inside him. Not the dam — not yet. But a hairline fracture in the wall he'd built against feeling anything at all.

He reached for the fish food.

"You know," he said, sprinkling flakes onto the water's surface, "Sarah always said goldfish have terrible memories. Maybe that's not a bug. Maybe that's the point."

The goldfish rose to eat, eager and present and utterly unburdened by yesterday. Marcus watched, and for the first time in six months, he considered: what would it mean to stop carrying everything? What would it mean to simply swim forward, making the same circles, because the water was there and the light was good?

He finished his wine. He washed the glass. He turned off the kitchen light.

Tomorrow he would call his sister. Tomorrow he might even mean it.

The fish swam on, innocent of its small grace.