What the Goldfish Knows

The goldfish had stopped swimming. It hovered near the glass surface of the bowl, its mouth opening and closing in silent repetition, while Elena sat on the edge of the bathtub with scissors in her hand.

She'd started running at dawn—actual running, her sneakers hitting the pavement in a rhythm that matched the thrumming in her chest. Three weeks after David moved out, and suddenly her body needed to move faster than her thoughts could catch up. Her hair had been the first thing to go. Long, dark strands that David had once wrapped around his fingers during pillow talk, now falling into the trash can in uneven clumps.

She was forty-two, and she looked like she'd been through a war.

"You're going to regret that," her sister had said over dinner the night before, watching Elena push spinach around her plate with a fork. "Hair grows back. But you're not eating. You're not sleeping. You're just running."

Elena hadn't told her about the dream. The one where she was running through a forest, something massive and dark bearing down on her from behind. She could feel its hot breath on her neck, hear the heavy crunch of its paws on pine needles. She'd woken up gasping, her sheets soaked through, alone in a bed that suddenly seemed enormous.

The goldfish—it belonged to her daughter, now away at college—drifted downward, its orange scales catching the bathroom light. Elena remembered buying it four years ago, how she'd stood in the pet store aisle while David lectured her on proper nitrogen cycling and tank filtration. She'd tuned him out, thinking about the colleague she'd slept with the previous weekend, wondering if love was just something you bore until it became bearable again.

She set down the scissors and reached for her phone instead.

"I'm ready to sell," she typed to the real estate agent. "The house. Everything."

Her thumb hovered over the send button. Outside, the morning light was turning gold, the kind of light that made everything look like a photograph taken decades ago. The goldfish swam up to the glass, watching her with that terrible blank stare, and she thought about how it had lived its whole life in a bowl, swimming in circles, mistaking repetition for progress.

Elena pressed send.