Three Seconds

The goldfish circles her bowl with the practiced indifference of something that has seen everything and forgotten most of it. Elara watches from the kitchen counter, wine glass in hand, as the small orange fish completes another lap.

Her iPhone vibrates against the marble—David again. Third time tonight. She doesn't pick up.

"You're lucky," she tells the fish. "Three-second memory, right? Must be nice."

The baseball game drags on in the living room, something she'd put on for background noise, for the illusion of company. David had loved baseball. Had taken her to games in those early months, bought her a cap she'd worn ironically, then sincerely, then not at all. The seventh-inning stretch had been where they'd had their first real conversation, leaning over the stadium rail, both slightly drunk on overpriced beer and the possibility of each other.

Now the announcer's voice fills her apartment like a ghost.

She'd started swimming again last week—laps at the YMCA, forcing herself into the rhythm of stroke, breathe, stroke, breathe. There was something about being underwater, the muffled world, the way your body became something functional rather than decorative. Something honest. Her mother had been a swimmer, before the pills, before the hospital, before the locked ward where Elara had visited her every Sunday for three years until the money ran out.

The iPhone lights up: *We need to talk.*

The goldfish breaks the surface, gulps air, sinks back down.

Elara finishes her wine in one swallow. The orange light of sunset is giving way to proper darkness, that particular violet-blue of Los Angeles evenings, the swimming pool of her complex glowing below like something sacred. She could go down there now. Strip off these clothes, slide into the water, let it take whatever weight she's still carrying.

Instead, she picks up the phone.

"Three seconds," she says to the empty room. "That's all any of us get anyway."