What the Goldfish Remembers

The lightning cracked across the sky just as Margot finished zipping her suitcase, the room illuminated in that stark,clinical white that makes everything look like evidence. She sat on the edge of the bed they'd shared for seven years and watched David sleep, his hair—now silvered at the temples, those jagged lightning strikes of time—spread across what used to be her pillow.

The goldfish in the bowl on the dresser swam its endless laps, orange fins flicking in the sudden light. Margot had bought it for David on their third anniversary, a joke about how goldfish supposedly remember nothing for longer than three seconds. Standing in the pet store aisle, she'd laughed and said, "Like us, right? Just keep swimming forward."

Now she wondered if the fish had been watching them all along, witnessing the slow erosion: the night David came home smelling of someone else's perfume, the mornings they stopped kissing goodbye, the arguments that began with "You never" and ended with slammed doors. Did the goldfish see the way his hair went from dark to streaked with lightning, the way her body changed under stress, the way they learned to touch each other without actually touching?

David stirred, eyes opening to find her watching him. For a moment, something like hope flared in his expression before he saw the suitcase by the door.

"Margo—"

"Don't," she said. "Please."

The lightning flashed again, and for a second she could see everything clearly: the way his hair had thinned at the crown, the lines around his mouth that weren't there when they met, the goldfish still swimming its indifferent circles through water that had grown murky with neglect.

"The fish," David said, sitting up. "I've been feeding it. I know you think I haven't, but—"

"That's not the point, David."

"What is the point?"

She looked at the goldfish, at its glass prison, at the way it kept returning to the same spaces in its bowl as if they were new each time. Some luxury, she thought—the ability to believe you're always somewhere fresh. Some curse, too.

"The point," Margot said, standing up and shouldering her bag, "is that I can't keep swimming in circles pretending I haven't been here before."

The lightning struck closer now, thunder rattling the windowpanes, and she walked out without looking back at the fish that had watched their entire marriage dissolve, glass-mouthed and silent, remembering everything they'd chosen to forget.