What the Water Remembers

Claire left Warren on the same day his mother finally forgot who he was. She'd packed her things in silence - the way zombies moved, he thought, without purpose or hunger, just the mindless shuffling of departure. She took the books, the good knives, left him with the house and his mother's old goldfish bowl.

Three fish, orange and bloated, swimming circles in water clouded with their own waste. His mother had always been stubborn as a bull about keeping them alive, changing their water religiously, even as her own mind became murkier.

"They're company," she'd say, hands shaking as she sprinkled flakes. "They remember."

They didn't, of course. Goldfish lived in perpetual novelty, each lap around the bowl a fresh discovery. Warren envied them.

That night, he found her medical diagnosis folded in her nightstand - early onset, five years predicted, already seven years gone. She'd known. She'd made arrangements.

The fox came at dusk, slipping through the unlatched garden gate. Warren watched from the kitchen window as it nosed at the compost pile, wild and rust-colored, completely uninterested in the order his life had become. It looked at him once - bright, unreadable eyes - before vanishing into the neighbor's yard.

Some things, Warren thought, belong to themselves.

His mother called him "David" - his brother's name, dead twelve years. She asked about the fish.

"They're fine, Mom."

"David always had such a gentle touch with animals."

She was happier this way, in her invented timeline where the dead lived and her remaining son was the one who'd survived.

Warren watched the goldfish swim, three creatures in a world they forgot every three seconds, forever surprised by their own existence. He understood the appeal. Claire had left a note: "You're already grieving someone who's still here. I can't watch you choose to be dead too."

She'd called him zombie-like.

He looked at his own reflection in the fish bowl - distorted, rippling, barely recognizable. The fish swam toward it, curious again, as if meeting him for the first time.

Warren decided to let the water go murky. Let them swim in it anyway.

The fox returned the next evening, and Warren left the gate unlatched. Some visitors shouldn't be kept out.