What We Keep Alive

The goldfish had outlived their marriage by three years. Leonard won it at a carnival in 2008, the night before everything started to crack, and now it swam in its crystalline cage on Sarah's countertop, orange and indifferent, a living reminder of the last time she'd believed in happily ever afters.

She stood over him with the scissors. Leonard's hair, once thick and prematurely gray in a way that made him look distinguished, now thinned across his crown. He'd come over for dinner—the third time this month—and somehow she'd ended up cutting his hair again. Old habits. Old hair.

"You're holding your breath," he said, watching her in the mirror.

"I'm not."

"You are. You always do when you concentrate."

The scissors made that distinctive snip-snip sound, tiny metallic bites. Gray strands drifted down like snow onto the towel she'd draped over his shoulders. Sarah was forty-two now. She'd found her first white hair last month, a solitary intruder amid the brown. She'd pulled it.

"I ran into Elena," Leonard said.

Sarah's hand faltered. A lock longer than the others fell to the floor.

"She's getting remarried."

"Good for her."

"She asked about you."

The goldfish surfaced, opened its mouth, sank again.

"Sarah."

"We're not doing this. I'm not your wife anymore, Leonard. I don't have to bear your confessions."

He caught her wrist. His thumb pressed against the pulse point where her blood hammered against skin. "You wouldn't cut my hair if you didn't still—"

"I cut your hair because you're too cheap to go to a barber."

She pulled away and stepped back. The scissors trembled in her hand. The goldfish watched from its bowl, ancient and wise, knowing something they didn't: how to keep swimming in the same small circles and call it a life.

"Sarah, I never stopped—"

"The goldfish is fourteen years old," she said. "That's older than any relationship we've had with anyone else. Maybe we should learn something from it."

"What?"

"Sometimes you just keep swimming. That's not living. That's just not dying yet."

She set down the scissors. Gray hair littered the linoleum like fallen promises.

"I think you should go now, Leonard."

He stood there, half-shorn, looking like the man she'd loved and the stranger he'd become. Then he nodded. The door clicked shut. Sarah fed the fish, watching flakes spiral down through water, and wondered if her own small life was just another bowl she hadn't figured out how to leave.