What the Goldfish Overheard
Mara watched the orange light of sunset bleed across the kitchen floor, staining everything the color of a bruise. The goldfish — a stubborn survivor she'd named Cézanne — floated in its bowl near the window, mouth opening and closing in silent witness.
Three weeks ago, she'd found the receipt in David's coat pocket. A private investigator. A spy, hired to shadow her own wife.
The betrayal wasn't the suspicion. It was that he hadn't bothered to ask. Hadn't sat her down in this kitchen, with its orange afternoon light, and said: I'm afraid. I think something is changing between us. I need to know if I'm crazy.
Instead, he'd paid someone to photograph her buying coffee. To note when she left the house, when she returned, who she met. Someone had followed her to her mother's grave, watched her place orange lilies on the headstone, taken notes on how long she knelt in the dirt.
'He thinks I'm having an affair,' she told CĂ©zanne. The fish turned in a slow circle, indifferent.
The truth was worse: she wasn't sleeping with anyone else. She was simply disappearing. The depression her mother's death had triggered wasn't infidelity — it was erosion. She was being worn away, layer by layer, until the woman David married had become something unrecognizable.
Tonight, he'd be home at seven. She'd feed the fish. He'd ask about her day, never mentioning the investigator in his pocket, never asking why she'd started sleeping in the guest room. They'd move around each other like ghosts in a haunted house, both haunting and haunted.
Mara dropped a flake of food into the bowl. CĂ©zanne rose to meet it, mouth breaking the surface.
'At least one of us is hungry,' she whispered.
The orange light faded to gray. She wasn't sure if she would tell him she knew about the spy. Maybe some secrets were worth keeping — even the ones that destroyed you, especially the ones that explained why you deserved destroying.
Outside, a car slowed. The headlights swept across the kitchen curtains, illuminating dust motes floating in the glass bowl.
She pressed her palm against the cool surface. 'You see everything,' she said to the fish. 'But you can't save me.'
CĂ©zanne flicked his tail and sank into the dark depths, and somewhere in the house, a key turned in the lock.