What the Goldfish Saw

The papaya's flesh was soft and decadent against my tongue, but everything else tasted like betrayal. I watched from the balcony of the padel club as Marcus's racquet cut through the humid afternoon air, each strike punctuating the silence between Elena and me. She was my oldest friend, the one who'd held my hair back when I was sick with mono in college, who'd stood beside me in a dress the color of bruised peaches at my first wedding. Now she sat beside me, her hand over mine, talking about the goldfish pond they'd installed in the backyard last spring.

"They have no memory, you know," Elena said, her thumb stroking my knuckles. "Every time around the bowl, it's like they're seeing everything for the first time."

I thought about the fox I'd seen yesterday in the garden—sleek and impossible, watching me through the glass as Marcus pressed against me from behind, his breath hot against my neck. The animal's eyes had been amber and judgmentless, and something in its gaze had made me pull away before things went too far. But only barely.

"Marcus wants to sell the house," Elena continued, oblivious. "He says the goldfish depress him. They just swim in circles, never getting anywhere."

"Maybe he's right," I said, and the papaya turned to ash in my mouth. Marcus had won the padel match. He was walking toward us now, his shirt transparent with sweat, smiling that smile that had made me question everything for the past six months.

I thought about memory—how goldfish supposedly lack it, how I wished I could be like them, circling endlessly in the dark water of forgetting. But I wasn't a goldfish, and neither was Elena. We remembered everything, especially what hadn't happened yet. The fox had known, running toward the treeline with its wet nose full of the scent of what two humans were about to break.