What We Inherit

The goldfish had outlived them all.

Emma stood in her dead friend's apartment, watching the orange blob drift through murky water. Marcus had been dead for three weeks, and still this stupid fish kept swimming—oblivious, indifferent, surviving on

autopilot and cheap flakes. Some inheritance.

"You should've been the one to go," she whispered, and the cat wound through her legs like liquid apology.

Barnaby had been Marcus's cat, a judgmental siamese who'd hated Emma for fifteen years. Now the animal rubbed against her shins, purring with desperate need. Animals didn't hold grudges. They just wanted warmth and food and someone to

sit in the chair.

The chair where Marcus used to drink himself into nightly stupors, ranting about their failed gallery, his estranged daughter, the cancer eating his mother while he wrote wills he never signed. Emma had stopped listening years ago. A friend

doesn't always stay because they're good for you; sometimes they stay because you're both too lazy to find replacements.

She'd come to pack his things. The real estate agent was coming Thursday.

The apartment smelled like stale coffee and cat litter and that particular odor of rooms that haven't felt sunlight in weeks. Emma opened a window. Barnaby jumped onto the counter, tail knocking against the

fishbowl. The goldfish didn't flinch.

"You're both useless," she told them.

Her phone buzzed. Marcus's daughter, asking if she'd found the life insurance policy. Emma had already found it—shoved in a cookbook with the policy's expiration date three years past. She debated whether to share that. Some truths

were kinder lost.

The goldfish surfaced, mouth opening and closing in silent repetition. Emma remembered Marcus winning it at a carnival, drunk at twenty-five, already nostalgic for a childhood he'd never actually had. He'd named it

Consuela because he'd said something pretentious about magical realism. They'd laughed then, before the gallery collapsed, before the drinking turned from charming to worrisome to tragic.

She picked up the bowl. Water sloshed against the glass.

"Okay," she said. "Okay."

Barnaby watched with his pale blue eyes as she carried the fish to the door. The cat followed her down the stairs, out of the building, into the grey Chicago morning. EmmaConsuela the fish rode shotgun in her passenger seat, Barnaby curled on the

backseat like a small judgment.

Some inheritances you choose.

She drove north, toward the lake, toward an apartment that would smell like her own life soon enough. Toward whatever came next, when all the packing was done and the cat adjusted and the fish kept swimming in its endless small circles,

reminding her that survival wasn't the same as living.

But it was something.