What Remains

The orange sat on the counter where David had left it three mornings ago, its skin already dimpling, a small rot starting at the stem. Elena hadn't touched it. Some superstitious part of her believed that moving it would mean accepting he wasn't coming back to finish his breakfast.

The apartment had never felt this large. Their arguments used to fill every corner, bouncing off the walls of the four hundred square feet they'd chosen together, optimistically, in the first flush of their thirties. Now the silence was heavier than either of them had ever been.

She poured a glass of wine and leaned against the kitchen island, staring at the goldfish bowl on the windowsill. Neptune, David called it, though they'd never determined if the fish was male or female. David had brought it home from a carnival two years ago, drunk on cheap beer and the possibility of winning something, anything, for her. The fish had outlasted his enthusiasm for aquarium maintenance. Elena was the one who remembered to feed it now, just as she remembered everything else.

"You'd be dead without me," she'd told him once, laughing, when she'd cleaned the algae from the glass.

He'd smiled, that particular smile that meant he knew she was right but wouldn't say so. "I know," he'd said. "That's the problem."

The problem wasn't that he'd left. The problem was that he'd left because she'd made herself indispensable, and somewhere along the way, indispensable had become unbearable. He'd needed to fail on his own terms.

She opened the refrigerator. The spinach was turning slimy at the edges. They'd planned to make salads, to start eating better, to be the kind of people who took care of themselves properly. Tomorrow, she'd promised herself for weeks. Tomorrow it would all be different.

Elena took the spinach to the sink and rinsed it, salvaging what she could. The fish swam to the front of its bowl, watching her with its unblinking eye. She dropped a pinch of food into the water.

"You and me," she said aloud, and the fish scattered the flakes in a small, sudden storm.

She threw the orange away. She made herself a salad. She fed the fish. Somewhere in the city, David was probably doing the same, learning how to keep himself alive without someone else to remember for him. The thought didn't hurt anymore. It just was.