Three Seconds of Memory

The baseball stadium roared around Mark, but he felt underwater — sounds muffled, movements distorted, everything pressing in on him like the weight of deep ocean. Sarah's seat beside him remained empty, just as it had for eight months, yet he still bought two tickets. Some habits calcify into bone.

He'd killed her goldfish that morning. Not intentionally. He'd simply forgotten to feed them after she left, and by the time he remembered, the two orange scales — Comet and Starr, she'd named them with that particular whimsy he'd fallen in love with — floated lifeless near the tank's surface. Three-second memories, people said about goldfish, but Sarah had argued they remembered longer. She'd sworn they recognized her hand at feeding time, swirling toward the glass whenever she entered the room.

Now he wondered if fish could feel abandonment. If they understood their person had stopped coming.

The bottom of the seventh inning stretch. Beer spilled somewhere nearby, the liquid glinting under stadium lights like the aquarium's filtered glow. Mark's phone buzzed — a text from her lawyer about the house. He stared at the screen without reading it, thumb hovering over delete.

People said goldfish made ideal pets for those afraid of commitment. Small, inexpensive, easily replaced. But Sarah had been fierce about them, researching proper tank temperatures, buying live plants instead of plastic ones, lecturing him about chlorine levels in tap water. She'd loved with that same intensity — thorough, demanding, unwilling to cut corners.

He'd cut corners anyway.

The stadium's Jumbotron showed a couple kissing on the Kiss Cam. The crowd cheered. Mark looked away, throat burning. He'd stopped watering her plants too. The peace lily in the bedroom was probably dead by now, leaves curled brown around edges like burned paper.

Water gathered in his eyes. Not enough to spill, just enough to blur the baseball diamond into swimming colors. Orange and green, like the fish tank's glow. Like Sarah's favorite dress.

Goldfish allegedly possessed three-second memories. What a gift that would be — to forget everything between one breath and the next. To wake each moment clean, no accumulation of loss, no sediment of regret at the bottom of your tank.

Mark stood, eighth inning beginning, and walked toward the concession stands. Away from the empty seat. Away from the memory of her voice explaining nitrogen cycles. Toward something, anything, that might make him feel like he was drowning less and living more.

The sink faucet leaked as he washed his hands hours later, water curling around the drain. Sarah would have fixed it. She would have called the plumber, or tried to herself, watching YouTube tutorials with fierce determination.

Mark watched the water spiral down, thinking about fish that recognize hands that no longer feed them, about stadiums that echo with absence, about the terrible durability of memory in a world that promised nothing lasted.

Then he turned off the faucet and left the bathroom dark behind him.