What We Cannot Keep

The pool sat empty in the backyard of the Airbnb—a pristine blue rectangle that Marcus and Elena had barely touched during their week-long stay. They were supposed to be reconnecting. Instead, they were untangling themselves, knot by silent knot.

"Should we just go home?" Elena asked from the pool's edge, her feet in the water.

Marcus didn't look up from his phone. "We paid for the whole week."

The owner's orange tabby cat appeared from under the deck, winding around Elena's ankles with a desperate affection that made her chest ache. She'd always wanted a cat. Marcus was allergic. Or that's what he'd said, ten years ago, when they'd moved in together and she'd given up the idea of ever having one.

Inside the house, on the kitchen counter, sat the goldfish they'd won at a carnival on their first date. Its bowl was clouded with algae, its orange scales dull in the afternoon light. Neither had remembered to feed it.

"It's still alive," Marcus said, appearing in the sliding glass door. "That thing's got to be eight years old."

"Goldfish don't live that long."

"This one does." He stepped outside, closing the door behind him. "Elena, can we talk?"

The cat jumped into her lap. She stroked its coarse fur, thinking about how she'd learned to live without things she wanted—a cat, children, honesty. The goldfish had become their joke: the thing that wouldn't die, like them, like the marriage they kept postponing ending.

"I met someone," Marcus said.

The cat stiffened, then leaped from her lap.

Elena looked at the pool, at the ripples she'd made with her feet. She thought about all the times she'd almost ended it, and all the times she hadn't. The goldfish in its tiny bowl, swimming in circles, going nowhere, alive only because someone kept forgetting to let it die.

"Okay," she said.

"Just okay?"

"What did you expect?"

Later that night, after he'd fallen asleep on the couch, Elena carried the goldfish bowl to the pool's edge. The fish rose to the surface, gasping. She lowered the bowl into the water, watching as the fish swam out—tentatively at first, then with a sudden burst of speed toward the deep end. It was a saltwater pool. The fish would be dead by morning.

But for tonight, it was free.