What Drowns in Us

Martha stood at the edge of the quarry lake, her widower's black hat soaking up the gray afternoon light. Below her, someone's abandoned goldfish had multiplied into an orange plague — hundreds of them swimming in the still water, oblivious to how they'd arrived there.

Three months after David's funeral, she'd finally understood why people called grief a swimming thing. You didn't walk through it. You moved through heavy water, each gesture requiring deliberate force. Even breathing felt like swimming upward toward a surface that kept receding.

She remembered the cat that had appeared at their kitchen window the morning after his heart attack — a stray calico with one ear, watching them with that unnerving patience cats possess. It had returned every day since, as if waiting for something David had promised but never delivered.

Her sister's voice echoed in her memory: "You're being a bull in a china shop, Martha. Normal people move on. They don't drive to quarries at twilight to stare at invasive fish."

Normal people. As if grief had protocols.

She removed the hat and placed it on a weathered fence post. A bull of a headache pressed behind her eyes — the same headache she'd carried through the funeral, through the condolence casseroles, through the night she'd finally sorted his ties by color and wept for three hours over a striped silk one he'd worn to their anniversary.

The goldfish continued their mindless circuits. She thought about how David had loved them — how he'd kept tanks in his office, in the garage, in the hallway of their first apartment. "They're always swimming," he'd said, "but they never get anywhere." He'd meant it as a joke about his own career, but she'd heard something else: a warning about staying in the same place too long.

The calico cat appeared on the rocks below, tail twitching. It watched her, then the fish, then her again. Martha felt sudden, fierce love for this creature that had witnessed her worst moments without judgment.

She didn't jump. She didn't scream. She simply retrieved her hat and walked back to the car, leaving the fish to their circuits. Some things were meant to swim in place. Others had to learn to walk through the heavy water until they reached the other side.