What We Keep Alive

The goldfish had been living in that cloudy bowl on Karen's nightstand for three years before either of us learned its name.橘子, she'd called it, pressing her fingers to the glass during chemo. Orange. It was the only Chinese word her mother remembered after the stroke took everything else.

Now the bowl was mine. The fish stared at me with those unblinking eyes, waiting for flakes that never came on schedule anymore.

"You forgot the vitamin D again," Sarah said from the doorway. She held up the amber bottle—the pills I was supposed to take with dinner, the ones that were supposed to fix something inside me that felt permanently broken. "You know what the doctor said."

"I know what she said."

"Then why?"

I didn't have an answer. Or maybe I had too many. Because swallowing a pill every night felt like admitting this—the empty side of the bed, the quiet house, the job I'd stopped showing up for weeks ago—was something that could be fixed with measured doses. Some things couldn't.

Sarah's dog, a rescued terrier mix named Lucky, nudged my hand with his wet nose. He'd been Karen's service animal during the worst of it, trained to detect seizures, trained to wake her if she stopped breathing in her sleep. Now he slept at the foot of my bed, and sometimes in the dark, I'd feel him press his side against my leg, checking.

The dog was still doing his job. The fish was still swimming its slow circles. They carried on like the world hadn't ended.

"I'm going back to the apartment," Sarah said. She was my sister, but she'd been sleeping in the guest room for two months, ever since the funeral. "I can't keep doing this for you."

"I never asked you to."

"No. You just stopped." She set the vitamin bottle on the nightstand, next to the fish bowl. "You stopped showing up at work. You stopped eating. You stopped taking care of yourself. Mom's gone, David. She's not coming back."

The fish broke the surface, gulping air.

"I know that," I said.

"Then act like it."

She left. Lucky followed her out, his nails clicking on the hardwood, and then stopped in the hallway and looked back at me.

I picked up the vitamin bottle. The pills rattled inside—tiny, ordinary things that were supposed to keep me going when nothing else did.

The fish watched. I swallowed two dry.

Tomorrow I'd feed him. Tomorrow I'd call my boss. Tomorrow I'd figure out who I was without someone to take care of. Tonight, I just watched them both suspended in their small worlds—桔子 swimming through water that hadn't been changed in weeks, and me, finally, finally deciding to stay alive.