What We Feed

Elena left on a Tuesday, taking the good towels and leaving me with a bowl of spinach wilting in the fridge and a goldfish that had survived three years of our marriage through sheer indifference.

I found the hat in the back of the closet that evening—my father's old baseball cap, the brim curved from years of him crushing it onto his head before every shift. I put it on. The smell of him hit me: tobacco and sweat and that particular soap scent that fathers have. I hadn't worn it since the funeral.

"Bullshit," I said to the empty apartment.

The goldfish swam to the glass, mouth opening and closing like it was trying to speak the words we never managed to say to each other. Elena called him Goldie. I never corrected her. His name was Carl, after the painter. She would have hated that.

We met at a baseball game, sixth inning stretch, Yankees down by three. She borrowed my lighter. I spent seven years thinking that was the moment—that instant of flame and contact—was when everything started. But the real beginning was probably earlier, or later, or not a single moment at all. Just a series of small accommodations, like the way I learned to love spinach because she did, or stopped wearing the hat because she said it made me look like a teenager's idea of a dad.

I sat on the floor and watched Carl. He bumped his nose against the glass, over and over, a prisoner who'd forgotten the walls were there. Elena called his tank "a minimalist installation." I called it a bowl. She said I lacked imagination.

Maybe she was right. Maybe that's why she left.

The thing about a goldfish—they grow to fit their space. Give them a bigger tank, and they keep growing. Keep them small, and they stay small forever, never knowing they were meant for something more. I'd thought Elena was the ocean. Turned out I was just the bowl.

I took off the hat and set it on the counter. Then I reached for the spinach container, opened it, and sprinkled a flake into Carl's water. He swam to it immediately, grateful to be fed anything at all.