What Remains in the Bowl

The goldfish hadn't eaten in three days, and neither had I. Not really. Elena had left behind the fish—named Bubbles, because she lacked imagination—as if aquatic life could survive her departure unchanged. She'd taken the dog, though. Barnaby, the golden retriever with the perpetually hopeful expression, now lived in her sister's backyard in Connecticut. I got the fish and the mortgage.

I stood in the kitchen, a bag of wilted spinach in one hand, a bottle of cheap merlot in the other. The spinach had been in the crisper drawer since before the fight. That night she'd screamed something about us drowning together, and I'd said nothing. Sometimes silence is its own kind of violence.

"You're not swimming," she'd said, grabbing her keys. "You're just not drowning yet."

Now I dropped the spinach into a pan with too much olive oil, watching it collapse the way everything eventually does. My phone buzzed—Elena, asking if I'd remembered to feed the fish. I ignored it. She'd taken the dog but left the responsibility, which seemed like the cruelest kind of metaphor. Barnaby had always loved her more anyway.

The goldfish drifted to the surface, mouth opening and closing in that perpetual O of surprise. I sprinkled flakes into the bowl. It was the first thing I'd done right all week. The spinach burned, acrid smoke curling toward the ceiling where the smoke detector had needed new batteries since 2019. Elena had been the one who remembered things like that. She was the one who bought the spinach. She was the one who'd wanted a dog.

I scraped the blackened greens into the trash and poured wine directly from the bottle. The goldfish watched me through distorted glass, suspended in its tiny universe, swimming the same laps over and over. At least it knew the shape of its world.

"We're both just waiting for someone to change our water," I told it.

The fish didn't respond. Fish never do. But its gills moved, rhythmic and persistent, and that was something. I took another drink and waited for the courage to do anything else at all.