What We Keep in Bowls

The cardboard box sat between them on the kitchen table like a mediator who'd already given up.

"You take the fish," Maya said, not looking at him. "I can't keep pretending to care about something that just floats in circles waiting to die."

The goldfish, suspended in its bowl on the windowsill, did exactly that — floated, waited, existed in the kind of suspended animation that had come to define their marriage over the past three years. Tom remembered buying it during that week they'd both called 'the reboot,' when they'd rearranged the living room and bought fresh sheets and promised this time would be different. The fish had survived four apartment moves, two miscarriages, and the slow erosion of everything they'd once promised each other.

"I don't want it either," he said, watching a water bubble break the surface. "But I also don't want to be the person who kills it by neglect. That feels too on the nose."

Maya laughed, a sharp, exhausted sound. "You're already leaving, Tom. The fish symbolism is really where you draw the line?"

She stood at the counter, her hair wet from the shower, dark strands plastering her neck in ways he used to find unbearably erotic and now just found sad. They used to shower together. He couldn't remember when they'd stopped.

"It's not symbolism," he said, though he wasn't sure what he meant by it. Nothing in their apartment was just itself anymore. Every object was a landmine of memory. The mugs were their wedding registry. The bed was where she'd told him about the second pregnancy. The goldfish was the last living thing they'd acquired together, a stupid impulse purchase from a street fair that had somehow outlasted everything else.

He picked up his hat from the counter — the navy beanie she'd given him two Christmases ago, back when they still put thought into gifts. When he pulled it on, her eyes flickered, just for a moment. She watched him put it on every morning. He'd forgotten she watched.

"Take it," she said softly. "You're right. It's better this way."

"The fish?"

"Everything."