What We Keep

The goldfish floated belly-up in the bowl, an orange sentinel marking the end of something. Maya watched it for a long moment before her iPhone lit up with David's name again. Third time today. She let it ring, watching the vibration shudder across the coffee table, scattering the mail she hadn't bothered to open.

"He's gone, Maya," her sister had said when their mother died, as if grief were something you could pack away in boxes. But loss wasn't like that. It was cumulative, each one settling into the hollows left by the last.

The cat — a stray she'd started feeding after the breakup, never bothering to name — jumped onto the windowsill, watching her with those assessing yellow eyes. She'd tried to shoo it away a dozen times. Now she found herself leaving food on the fire escape, some small tether to the world.

Maya stood at the counter chopping spinach for dinner she wouldn't eat, the knife rocking through leaves like breathing. In through the nose, out through the serrated edge. David had loved her cooking, or said he had. Another thing she'd gotten wrong.

Her bear tattoo — the one she'd gotten at twenty-two on a whiskey-dared road trip, convinced it meant something about courage — itched in the humidity above her collar. She traced it reflexively, ink beneath skin, permanent as mistakes.

The goldfish had been David's idea. Something low-maintenance, he'd said. We can practice taking care of something together. They'd practiced for eight months before he moved out, leaving behind the fish and the potted succulent that was now mostly dirt.

She flushed the fish down the toilet, watching the water swallow it whole. The iPhone buzzed again — David, probably worried she wasn't responding. Or maybe just lonely. She didn't pick up. Some things, once broken, stayed that way. The cat meowed from the windowsill, and she went to open the can, thinking how strange it was that she kept saving things, even the ones that didn't ask to be saved.