What We Feed

The goldfish circled his bowl, trailing orange fins through the neon-lit water. Marcus watched it from the hotel bed, phone glowing with texts from his wife back in Seattle. Outside, Miami hummed with humidity and the promise of bad decisions.

"You're going to overfeed him," Elena said from the doorway. She held two glasses—papaya margaritas, the fruit's flesh soft and ripe as a bruise. "You always do. You think more means caring."

Marcus set the phone face-down. "It's just a fish, Elena."

"It's not just a fish." She perched on the bed's edge, her perfume (gardenia, something expensive and temporary) cutting through the room's stale air. "It's the third one this month. You keep loving them to death."

The baseball game flickered on the television—Mariners vs. Marlins, bottom of the ninth. Marcus had played college ball once, before the injury, before Elena, before the promotion that required conferences in cities where no one knew his name.

He took the margarita. Sweet, cloying, the kind of drink that made you forget you were forty-two with a mortgage and a stock portfolio and a wife who'd stopped looking at him like he was worth solving.

"Julie's suspicious," Elena said, watching the fish.

"Julie thinks I'm closing deals."

"Julie's not stupid, Marcus. Neither am I." Her fingers traced his knee through the hotel sheets. "This is the last time."

He knew she was lying. They'd said that in Chicago, in Austin, in Denver. Each conference, another city, another hotel room with its complementary goldfish (Elena called them their witnesses—silent, swimming, doomed). The fish was their metaphor. They were both overfeeding something that couldn't sustain them.

The fish swam to the surface, mouth opening and closing. Marcus thought of Julie at home, probably watching the same game, probably wondering why his texts had grown shorter.

"The papaya's going to go bad," he said, not meeting her eyes.

"Everything goes bad eventually." Elena's hand moved higher. "You feed it or you don't. You can't do both."

The crowd roared from the television. Someone hit a home run. Somewhere, a marriage ended. Somewhere, a fish swam in circles it couldn't escape.

Marcus finished his drink. It tasted like regret and artificial sweetener and the certain knowledge that some mornings, you wake up and realize you've become exactly what you never wanted to be.

"Feed it," he said. "Just don't overfeed it."

Elena smiled, all teeth and no warmth. "Too late."

The goldfish floated belly-up. Somewhere in Seattle, Julie was probably watching baseball alone. Somewhere in Miami, water rippled in a bowl, and a man made another choice he couldn't unmake.