What We Keep

The apartment was quieter without her. That's what David noticed first—the absence of her humming while she cooked, the way her keys used to jingle in the bowl by the door. Now it was just him and the cat, a surly black thing named Monday who'd belonged to Sarah and had apparently decided to tolerate David out of necessity rather than affection.

He stood in the kitchen, staring at a bag of spinach that had gone slimy in the crisper drawer. Sarah had bought it three days before the accident. She'd been on this health kick, taking her vitamin D supplements religiously, eating salads with those terrible seeds she insisted were good for his heart. He'd complained every time. Now he'd give anything to sit across from her and pick through another bowl of rabbit food.

"You're going to have to bear with me," David told Monday, who sat on the counter, watching him with what looked distinctly like judgment. "I don't know how to do this."

The cat meowed, jumped down, and padded toward the living room.

David followed, his socked feet silent on the hardwood. In the corner, Sarah's goldfish bowl glowed with a soft blue light. She'd won the fish at a carnival two years ago—some ridiculous game where you toss rings onto bottles. She'd named him Lucky, which David had pointed out was ironic given that he lived in a glass prison.

"You're still here," David whispered to the fish, which drifted near the surface, mouth opening and closing in silent repetition.

That's when it hit him: everything ends. The spinach rots. The vitamins run out. Even the cat would eventually leave him or die. But this stupid fish, this carnival prize with a lifespan of three years max, had outlasted her. The wrongness of it made his chest ache.

He sank onto the sofa and Monday hopped onto his lap, purring unexpectedly. David buried his face in the cat's fur, letting himself cry for the first time since the funeral. The fish kept swimming, indifferent to his grief, and outside, the world kept turning, and somehow, impossibly, he would have to learn to live in a world where Sarah existed only in the spaces between things.