What Remains in the Bowl

The goldfish was still alive. That was the first thing Mara noticed when she walked into her mother's kitchen — the orange carp swimming lazy circles in a bowl on the windowsill, somehow still alive after twelve years. It should have died years ago. Everything else had.

Her mother had passed three weeks ago. The funeral was short. The relatives, who'd never bothered to visit while Patricia was alive, came with casseroles and false sympathy. Mara stood by the gravesite thinking about how she'd forgotten to call for two months before the stroke, and now she never would again.

She opened the refrigerator. The smell hit her first — that particular combination of neglect and organic decay. On the middle shelf, a plastic container of wilted spinach, fuzzy with mold, exactly where her mother had placed it before getting sick. Patricia loved spinach. She grew it in the garden until her hands became too unsteady to weed. She used to make Mara eat it raw with lemon juice when she was a child, insisting it would make her strong. Now it was just rotting leaves in a plastic tomb.

"You're going to throw that out, aren't you?"

Mara jumped. Her aunt was standing in the doorway, arms crossed. "The spinach. It's been there since before she died."

"Yes."

"Good. Can't live in the past forever. Some of us have jobs to get back to."

Her aunt wanted the house sold. The split. Mara's inheritance would be twelve thousand dollars, enough for a used car or a vacation she couldn't afford to take. She thought about the spinach, the goldfish, the way her mother's lipstick was still on the bathroom counter. How do you put a price on twelve years of accumulated debris, the physical evidence of a life?

Something brushed against her ankle. Barnaby — her mother's ancient, one-eyed cat, winding through her legs with a demanding purr. He'd been a kitten when Mara left for college, middle-aged when she got married, elderly when she divorced. Now he was somehow still here, arthritic and demanding, survived by the same stubborn inertia that kept the goldfish swimming and the spinach rotting in the fridge.

Mara realized she didn't want the money. She wanted to stay in this house filled with ghosts and debris, feeding the cat and changing the fish water, until she became just another thing her aunt needed to clear away.

"You're not serious about keeping it," her aunt said, reading her face.

Mara looked at the goldfish, swimming its endless circles, and at the cat pressing his warm weight against her leg. "No," she said. "I'm not."

She lied. For the first time in her life, she knew exactly what she wanted.