Three Second Memory

The hotel pool was empty at 2 AM, which was exactly what Elena needed. She slipped into the water fully clothed - linen dress soaking up chlorine like a sponge - and let herself float on her back. Above her, the constellation of cables spanning the city skyline glowed against the darkness. Fiber optic veins carrying everyone's secrets but hers.

"Steve's moving in with her," the lawyer had said that afternoon. "He wants the house. He wants the goldfish."

The goldfish. The one she'd won him at a carnival in 2013, the night he'd proposed. It had survived three apartments, two miscarriages, and his affair with the paralegal. Now it would swim in someone else's bowl.

Elena's dress billowed around her like a drowning jellyfish. She remembered how they'd watched the baseball playoffs here on their honeymoon, drunk on overpriced champagne and the certainty that they'd be different from their parents - from marriages that curled at the edges like burnt paper.

Instead, she'd become her mother: cold, practical, slowly suffocating. And he'd become his father: always searching, never finding, convinced the real life was just around the next corner.

Her phone buzzed on the lounge chair - Steve, probably. Or the lawyer. Or maybe just the cable company reminding her that their joint subscription ended tomorrow.

She sank beneath the surface, held her breath until her lungs burned. Goldfish had three-second memories, supposedly. Maybe that was the trick. Maybe if she could forget everything every three seconds, she wouldn't feel like she was dissolving.

When she broke the surface, gasping, the hotel room's lights flickered on in the window above. A shadow moved behind the curtains. Not Steve. Not the paralegal.

Just another stranger in another city, watching cable TV alone in the middle of the night, while somewhere a goldfish swam endless circles in a bowl that no longer belonged to her.