What We Bear in the Ending

The goldfish circled its bowl in the corner of the attorney's office, orange flashes against the glass walls. Elena watched it while Marcus explained their separation agreement to the lawyer, their lives reduced to asset divisions and custody schedules.

She thought about how she'd bought that goldfish on their tenth anniversary, a joke gift because Marcus had always wanted pets but neither of them had time for anything real. Now it swam in endless loops, trapped in clear water that had grown cloudy with neglect.

"The house," Marcus was saying, "we agreed she keeps it through the school year."

Elena's throat felt thick. She swallowed the taste of old words, swallowed the way he'd looked at her last month when she told him she couldn't bear another night of his distance, his sphinx-like silences that answered nothing and explained less. He had become a mystery to her, their marriage a riddle she'd stopped trying to solve.

"Ms. Chen?" The lawyer looked at her. "Does that work?"

She nodded. Water was gathering in her eyes, hot and humiliating. She refused to let it fall. Some things you just had to bear alone.

"The retirement accounts," Marcus continued, his voice steady as ever. "Split down the middle, as discussed."

She remembered watching a bear at the zoo once, how it had paced its enclosure, back and forth, back and forth, wearing a path into the concrete. That was them now, she realized. They had worn their marriage into a groove, paced it until it was nothing but repetition and exhaustion.

"We need to discuss the goldfish," Elena said, her voice rusty.

Marcus glanced at the bowl. "What?"

"Who gets it?" She heard how ridiculous it sounded, their entire marriage reduced to who would inherit a three-dollar fish.

"I don't want it," he said, and something about the way he said it—that he didn't want anything that had belonged to them—made something inside her crack open.

The attorney cleared his throat. "Perhaps Ms. Chen could keep—"

"Take it," Elena said, standing up. She couldn't bear to be in this room another minute. "Take everything. Just let me get my coat."

She walked out into the rain, and finally let herself weep, letting the water mix with rain on her face, bearing the weight of all the endings she'd collected in forty-seven years, somehow still surprised that this one hurt as much as it did.