What the Water Remembers
Ellen left on a Tuesday, which felt wrong somehow β like she should've waited for Friday, given him the weekend to drink himself into acceptance before returning to work on Monday. But Ellen had never been considerate about timing. That was part of the problem.
Now it's 2 AM and the apartment is so quiet he can hear the refrigerator humming, the same sound that used to drive her crazy. She'd complained about it for years. He never called the landlord.
On the television, muted, a baseball game drifts into extra innings. He used to love baseball β the crack of the bat, that perfect suspended moment when the ball decides its own fate. Ellen called it "grown men standing in a field waiting for something to happen." He'd laughed. She wasn't wrong, but that was the point: waiting was the whole game. Waiting was living.
The cable bill came yesterday. $147. He stares at the envelope on the kitchen counter, another unopened wound. He should cancel it. He should cancel everything β the streaming services, the gym membership she never used, the life they built together like a house of cards nobody had the heart to knock down.
Instead he walks to the corner where their son's goldfish bowl still sits on a low table, cloudy and neglected. Marcus has been with his mother for three weeks. The custody arrangement is temporary, they said. Everything is temporary until it's not.
The goldfish βε½εδΈΊ Pancake, because Marcus was four and had a singular fixation β floats near the surface, mouth opening and closing in that silent, desperate rhythm. Ellen was supposed to take it. "You keep the fish," she'd said, throwing clothes into a suitcase with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd been planning her departure for months. "I'm done taking care of things that just die anyway."
He drops a flake of food into the bowl. Pancake doesn't move.
"Yeah," he says to the empty room. "Me too."
On the screen, a player swings at a pitch he should've let pass. Strike three. The inning ends. Another chance lost, another beginning deferred. He watches the player walk back to the dugout, head down, shoulders curved around something like grief or maybe just exhaustion.
He picks up the cable bill, opens it, and for the first time in three weeks, allows himself to imagine what happens next β not the fixed future he'd assumed, but something else. Something that might begin or end or simply continue, like a game stretching toward dawn, like a fish learning to swim in water that keeps forgetting it's there.
The fish rises slowly to meet the food.