What the Sphinx Forgot

The goldfish bowl sat on Maya's desk like a neglected oracle, its solitary inhabitant circling the same glass oval, endlessly forgetting it had just been here. Maya watched it during her conference calls, that flash of orange against the corporate beige of her cubicle.

"You're like a sphinx," Ethan had told her three nights ago, his voice thick with wine and frustration. "Impossible to read. No one can ever tell what you're thinking."

He'd said it like it was an accusation, but isn't that what they all wanted? Some mystery to unravel. Some depth to plumb. Instead she'd given him nothing but her practiced silence, her face smooth as carved stone while he packed his things in cardboard boxes that smelled like cheap tape and endings.

Now the goldfish—Bubbles, she'd named it ironically in a moment of whimsy—regarded her with its perpetually open mouth, that eternal gasp of surprise. Or maybe it was judgment. Hard to tell with fish.

Her phone lit up. Ethan.

Maya's thumb hovered over the screen. Outside her window, lightning cracked the sky in two, a sudden violent white that made the fishbowl flare like a trapped sun. The storm had been threatening all afternoon, that heavy atmospheric pressure that makes your joints ache and your heart hurt for reasons you can't name.

She remembered the night she'd won Bubbles at a carnival—Ethan's arm warm around her shoulders, the smell of funnel cakes and cotton candy, his laugh when she'd somehow managed to land the ping-pong ball on the very first try. Some dumb luck he'd called it, pressing a kiss to her temple that tasted like artificial grape and possibility.

The goldfish swam its eternal lap, forgetting her as easily as it had forgotten that night, as easily as she would someday forget the way Ethan looked standing in her doorway with his boxes, his face full of that terrible open-mouthed expression she hadn't been able to read.

Maya let the phone ring until it stopped. The lightning flashed again, illuminating her reflection in the glass—her own face, sphinx-like and inscrutable, watching herself watch a fish that would never remember her, not that it mattered. Not that any of it did. Outside, the rain finally began to fall, and she turned back to her spreadsheet, the orange shape swimming on and on, innocent and infinite and altogether without memory.