What Remains in the Bowl

The reception room smelled of mixed emotions and cheaper catering. Maya stood by the buffet table, staring at a sliced papaya that looked remarkably like a heart cut open. Someone had arranged the spinach leaves beneath it in a way that seemed cruelly artistic.

"Your mother loved this song," David said, appearing beside her with two champagne flutes. He'd aged in the three years since she'd last seen him—not in the way people do naturally, but in that accelerated way grief imposes on a person.

"She hated jazz," Maya said, accepting the glass anyway. "That was Dad."

"Right. Right." David swirled his champagne. "I keep getting them mixed up in my head. The good memories and the real ones."

Maya nodded. She understood the impulse to edit the dead into more palatable versions of themselves. Her mother had been difficult—sharp-tongued, critical, emotionally withholding. But she'd also bought Maya her first art supplies, stayed up all night sewing costumes for the school play, and once drove three hours in a rainstorm to bring her forgotten antibiotics. People are never one thing.

On the serving table beside her, someone had placed a bowl with a single orange goldfish swimming in endless circles. Maya watched it navigate its tiny world, reminded of her mother's last months in that assisted living facility—trapped in a room with a window that looked out on a parking lot, making the same rounds of memory and complaint until they wore grooves in the air.

"Who brought a fish?" she asked.

"It was Mom's," David said. "From her apartment. The nurse said she fed it every morning. Talked to it more than she talked to any of us."

Maya felt something tighten in her chest. Her mother, who had struggled to say "I love you" without irony or deflection, had poured her affection into a creature that could never answer back, never disappoint, never leave.

"I'll take it," she heard herself say.

David looked at her with genuine surprise. "You?"

"Someone should. Someone who won't forget to feed it."

He studied her face for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "That would be good. That would be really good, Maya."

The goldfish surfaced, gasping at the water's surface before descending again. Maya took her brother's arm, linking them together for the first time since they were children. They stood like that until the jazz ended, watching the fish make its small revolutions in the water, finding something like comfort in the persistence of its movement.