What We Keep Alive

The goldfish—Marvin, Sarah had named him, because he looked perpetually surprised—swam in tight circles, oblivious to the fact that she'd been dead for three weeks. I dropped another pinch of flakes into the bowl, watching the orange scales flash in the gloom of her apartment. Everything smelled like her still: lavender and old books and the particular sourness of illness that no amount of cleaning could quite erase.

"You're going to kill him with kindness," Sarah's sister had said when she pressed the bowl into my hands at the funeral, like I'd been appointed keeper of something sacred. "She loved that stupid fish."

I'd loved her. Not in the way she needed, not in time. That was the joke of it, really—the sort of cosmic irony that would've made her laugh if she weren't already ashes in an overpriced urn.

The radio droned in the background—baseball playoffs, the Yankees down by two. Sarah had hated baseball. Called it "grown men standing around in tight pants waiting for something to happen." But I'd loved it since I was a kid, loved the mathematics of it, the way failure was built into the system. Even the best batter fails seven times out of ten. I found that comforting somehow.

My phone buzzed. Mark. Again.

"You coming tonight?" his text read. "We're doing that thing at O'Malley's."

I stared at the words, let them blur. Mark had been my friend since college, but he didn't know about Sarah. Didn't know why I'd been skipping Thursday nights for six months. Some things you couldn't explain without sounding pathetic. Forty years old and carrying a torch for a woman who'd never looked at me quite that way, who'd died thinking I was just the guy who fed her fish when she was too weak to lift her arms.

I opened the refrigerator. There was spinach, wilting and forgotten in the crisper drawer. Sarah had tried to get me to eat better, always leaving me Tupperware containers of healthy things I'd never finish. "You're going to die before you're fifty," she'd say, and I'd laugh because it sounded like a promise rather than a warning.

The fish surfaced, mouth opening and closing in that silent, desperate way.

"Yeah," I said to the empty room. "Me too, buddy."

I scooped the spinach into a pan, watched it wilt in the heat, thinking about how everything eventually gives way to something else—heat, time, gravity. The radio crowd roared. Someone had hit a home run. Somewhere, Mark was probably raising a glass, wondering where I was.

But Sarah was gone, and Marvin kept swimming in circles, and I was standing in her kitchen making dinner for one, learning that some griefs don't end. They just become part of you, like a scar you stop noticing until it rains.

"Bottom of the ninth," the announcer said, and I ate my spinach, and waited.