What Goldfish Forget

Elena still wore his hat to work every morning, the fedora perched on her head like a crown of thorns. Three years since Marcus left, and she'd become the office eccentric—the woman who communed with her lunch. Her cubicle smelled perpetually of papaya, sweet and cloying, the fruit he'd hated that she'd grown to love out of spite.

"You're like a goldfish," he'd told her during their final fight, his voice cracking in the breakroom where everyone could hear. "Three seconds, and you forget everything that matters." He was talking about her father's funeral, how she'd shown up late and forgotten the eulogy, how she kept misplacing the emotional labor of their marriage like car keys.

Now she kept actual goldfish in a bowl on her desk. Six of them, orange flashes against the gray corporate backdrop. Her coworkers whispered about her breakdown, but Elena had never felt clearer.

She sliced into a ripe papaya during her lunch break, juice running down her wrist. The new IT director, David, leaned against her cubicle wall. "Your fish are staring at me," he said.

"They're not judging you," Elena said, not looking up. "That's my job."

David laughed—startled, genuine. He had kind eyes, the kind Marcus never had. "Want to grab dinner? There's this Thai place—"

"I don't date coworkers," she said automatically, a reflex from HR trainings she'd attended alone.

"I'm leaving next week. New job in Seattle." He smiled, crooked and hopeful. "No conflict of interest."

Elena looked at her goldfish, swirling in their too-small bowl. They'd forget this conversation in three seconds, swim to the other side, and forget again. But she wasn't a fish. She was a woman who remembered everything—the papaya on Marcus's breath when he said he loved her, the way his hat smelled of hair pomade and cigarettes, the precise moment her heart stopped breaking and started hollowing out.

She took off his hat and set it on her desk. "Thai sounds nice," she said. "But I'm picking the restaurant."

David's smile widened. "Deal."

The goldfish swam on, oblivious, as Elena tossed the papaya skin and finally, finally, began to forget.