What Drowns and What Floats

The goldfish hadn't moved in three days.

Elara watched it drift in the bowl on her kitchen counter, its orange scales dulling like a promise made too late. Mark had bought it during their second month together — 'a trial run,' he'd called it, laughing over sake at that tiny place downtown where they'd spent three hours debating whether they were ready for a dog. A fish was compromise. A fish was safe.

Now the fish floated suspended in its silent universe, and Elara was alone in the apartment she'd signed the lease for yesterday morning, boxes still stacked like walls against the outside world.

She turned to the stove where spinach wilted in the pan, collapsing the way she'd collapsed last Thursday when Mark said he didn't want children, not ever, and she realized she'd been making decisions based on a future he'd never agreed to build. The steam rose up, fogging her glasses. She couldn't see the fish anymore. Couldn't see anything.

Her mother had loved spinach. Had sworn it kept her young, right up until the cancer ate through her forty-three-year-old body like water through paper. Elara had been twenty-two, standing in her mother's kitchen, watching steam rise from a pot just like this one, understanding that some things dissolve no matter how carefully you tend them.

The sink was dripping. She should call the landlord. Should unpack. Should flush the fish down the toilet where it would join whatever forgotten things the city carried away in its water.

Instead, she slid down to the cold tile floor and let herself cry, really cry, for the first time since the breakup. Her tears joined the drip-drip-drip of the sink, a rhythm she'd been ignoring for weeks. The spinach burned on the stove. The fish moved suddenly — a flick of tail, a spark of orange life in the murky water.

Elara stood up, turned off the burner, watched smoke curl from the pan like the ghost of something that could have been nourishing. She carried the fish bowl to the window where late afternoon light could reach it.

"You and me both," she whispered.

The goldfish swam toward the light, and Elara called the plumber, then ordered Thai food from the place around the corner. Some things could be fixed. Some things had to be let go. And some things, she was beginning to understand, would simply float until they learned to swim on their own.