What We Bury in the Backyard

The goldfish had been floating belly-up for three days before Marc finally buried it behind the garage. His wife Elena had bought it on impulse, during that brief, delusional week after her diagnosis when she'd decided they needed more life in the house. That was six months ago. Now the fish was dead, Elena was mostly gone to the morphine, and Marc found himself digging a shallow grave with a kitchen spoon in the rain.

Their dog, Buster, watched from the back door—suspicious, as if Marc might be burying something more consequential. Buster's gray muzzle pressed against the glass, his rheumy eyes following the spoon's movements. Once, Buster would have chased squirrels up the oak trees. Now he mostly slept in the patch of sunlight that moved across the living room floor, waiting.

"You're doing it wrong," Elena said from the doorway. Marc jumped. He hadn't heard her wheelchair on the deck. She'd cut her hair last week—the first thing to go when the chemo took its toll. She looked like a stranger with those bare shoulders and hollow cheeks.

"It's just a fish, El."

"Everything is just something until it's not." She wheeled closer. Lightning cracked across the sky, purple and arterial, illuminating the wet deck and her pale face. "Remember when Tom was little? He called the cat 'Lightning' for three months because she was so fast? And then one day she was gone, and he understood things leave."

Marc wiped rain from his eyes. "Tom isn't little anymore. He's thirty-two and he hasn't visited since January."

"He'll come." Elena's voice was thin but certain. "When it's time. People come when it's time."

The goldfish was supposed to teach them about loss—the small, practice death before the real ones arrived. But Marc couldn't feel anything except irritation that he was digging in the dark with a spoon while his wife watched, her presence both anchor and accusation.

"Help me," she said suddenly. "I want to say goodbye."

He lifted her from the chair, feeling the sharp new angles of her spine. She weighed almost nothing. She knelt in the mud, her hospital pajamas soaking through, and placed her hand over the little hole where the spoon had disturbed the earth.

"See you later, fish," she whispered. Then louder: "Tell them we're coming. Tell them we're not afraid."

Lightning struck again, closer this time. The thunder shook the deck. Buster whined from inside the house. And Marc understood with sudden, terrible clarity that she wasn't talking about the fish at all.