Until the Water Goes Dark

The goldfish was the last one left. Bernard watched it circle the bowl—orange against the glass, indifferent to the quiet dismantling of his marriage. Sarah had taken the cat yesterday. A sensible choice. Barnaby had been hers anyway, a haughty Siamese who'd always regarded Bernard with something approaching suspicion. The cat carrier had looked like a small spacecraft departing for a better planet.

"You can keep him," Sarah had said about the dog, though 'keep' wasn't the word. She'd meant 'you're stuck with him now.' Buster was old, his muzzle gone white, his hips stiff with arthritis. He'd been Bernard's walking companion through three years of distance building between them like sediment in a still pond. Now Buster lifted his head from the rug, fixed Bernard with milky eyes, and sighed. A long, rattling sound that seemed to say: so this is how it ends.

The goldfish—whose name Bernard couldn't remember, some forgotten compromise from early marriage days—continued its endless revolution. Sarah had taken the good blender. The artisanal bread knife. The emotional vocabulary they'd once shared. Bernard had kept the dog, the fish, and the sudden silence that filled rooms where laughter used to live.

He considered feeding the fish, then realized he didn't know if he'd fed it yesterday. Time had become elastic, stretchy and unreliable. Days blurred into evenings that blurred back into days. The dog needed medication at eight. The fish needed—what did fish need? Nothing? Everything? To not be forgotten in a house that felt increasingly like a museum exhibit titled 'Life Before.'

Buster struggled to standing, his nails clicking on hardwood that would soon be someone else's. The house was sold. The papers were signed. Two weeks until the new owners took possession of rooms that had held their history, now stripped to neutral tones. Neutral. That was the word. Everything needed to be neutral now.

Bernard dropped a pinch of food into the bowl. The fish surfaced, gulping, and he felt something tighten in his chest—the smallest acknowledgment of existence, of need, of being necessary to something alive. Even a creature with a seven-second memory.

"We're both just swimming in circles," he said aloud. Buster whined softly and rested his chin on Bernard's foot. The weight was familiar, grounding. The fish continued its patient revolution, and for the first time in weeks, Bernard didn't feel completely alone in the water.