What the Goldfish Forgot

The spinach was still in her teeth when he told her he wanted a divorce.

Miriam had spent three hours on the ricotta gnocchi, rolling each dumpling by hand, dusting them with semolina like she was marking time. The spinach—foraging greens, bitter and earthy—had been the one thing David actually praised when he walked through the door at 7:43, late again, smelling of ozone and someone else's perfume. 'This is good,' he'd said, and for a moment she'd believed it mattered.

Now they sat across from each other at the marble island, the space between them widening by the second. In the living room, the goldfish—Bubbles II, successor to Bubbles I, who'd met an untimely end during their engagement party—swam its endless laps in the five-gallon tank. David had bought it as a joke, something about how fish only remember for seven seconds, so every trip around the bowl was a fresh adventure. At the time, Miriam had laughed. Now she watched the fish navigate the same plastic castle, again and again, and wondered if some marriages operated on the same principle.

'I don't understand,' she said, and the words felt thick, unformed. 'You said things were good. You said—'

'I know what I said.' David wouldn't meet her eyes. His attention wandered to the sphinx lamp on the sideboard—a brass Art Deco piece they'd found at an estate sale last summer, its face frozen in an eternal riddle. They'd argued over which room it belonged in. He'd won, as usual.

'Then why?'

'That's the thing, Miri.' He finally looked at her, and his expression was so gentle it broke her heart all over again. 'I keep asking myself that question. But it's like—there's this answer, right at the back of my mind. And every time I think I've got it, it slips away. Like trying to hold water in your hands.' He gestured vaguely toward the fish. 'Maybe I'm just becoming a goldfish. Maybe everything good only lasts seven seconds now.' She thought about their wedding photos, tucked away in a drawer she never opened. About the way he used to trace her spine while they watched movies. About the spinach still caught between her front teeth, a small green flag of surrender she couldn't quite reach.

'Maybe,' she said, 'the problem isn't that you're forgetting. Maybe the problem is that you're finally remembering.'

The goldfish surfaced, opened its mouth once, and disappeared behind the plastic castle. The sphinx lamp watched them both, its brass eyes reflecting a truth they'd both ignored: some riddles don't have answers. They have endings.

David stood up. His napkin fell to the floor, a white flag. 'I'll stay at the Wyndham tonight.' He kissed her forehead—a perfunctory benediction—and left. Miriam sat at the marble island and finished her gnocchi alone, cold congealed cream coating her tongue, while in the living room, the fish began another lap around its tiny kingdom, forgetting everything it had ever known.