What We Keep

The hotel room smelled faintly of chlorine and someone else's citrus shampoo. Elena stared at the goldfish bowl on the dresser—Barnaby's orange tail flicking lazily in the cloudy water. He was the only thing she'd taken from the house.

"It's just a fish," David had said, watching her pack, his voice thick with that particular exhaustion that comes after seven years of quiet disappointment. "You're not even taking the vitamins. You're taking the fish."

She hadn't bothered to explain that the vitamins were his idea—his insistence that she supplement her life into something more perfect, more complete. Swallow them with water, he'd say, like a prayer.

Now, three weeks later, she was running. Not away, really, but through. Six miles every morning along the river, her breath forming clouds in the October chill, her sneakers hitting the pavement in a rhythm that finally made sense. Running until her legs burned, until she couldn't think about how the bed in her new apartment was too big, or how she still reached for him in sleep.

The phone buzzed. David.

She stared at Barnaby, who stared back with his perpetually surprised mouth. "Your owner's calling," she told him. The fish didn't respond.

"Barnaby died," David said when she answered. His voice sounded different—smaller. "Yesterday. He just... stopped swimming."

Elena's throat tightened. "Oh."

"I flushed him this morning. I didn't know what else to do." A pause. "I still have your vitamins. The ones you left. They're in the medicine cabinet, behind the aspirin. Do you want them?"

She looked at the water rippling around Barnaby's impostor twin. "No. You can throw them out."

"I was thinking," he said, and in the silence that followed, she heard everything they couldn't say. All the water under all their bridges. "Maybe we could start over. Fresh."

She thought about running, about vitamins, about goldfish in bowls who never knew they were swimming in circles. About how sometimes love is just two people trying not to drown, separately, in the same tiny sea.

"David," she said softly. "Some things don't get better with supplements."

She hung up and watched the fish turn, orange scales catching the morning light. Tomorrow, she thought, she'd stop running. Tomorrow, she'd buy herself some vitamins—or maybe she wouldn't. Either way, the water would keep moving, and so would she.