What We Keep in Glass Bowls

The goldfish died on a Tuesday, while Marcus was at work and Elena was staring at the papaya ripening on the counter. It was supposed to be her weekend to remember to feed him—Bubbles, they'd called him, a name so unoriginal it was almost funny—and now his orange scales were drifting through the water like embers.

She found herself thinking about baseball. Specifically, about the summer she turned twelve, when her father took her to a minor league game in a city whose name she couldn't remember anymore. He'd bought her a foam finger, and lightning had cracked the sky open in the eighth inning. They'd run to the car through a deluge, him laughing as she tried to keep the finger dry, as if that mattered. He'd died three years ago, and she still couldn't walk past a sporting goods store without feeling something hollow behind her ribs.

Their cat, Luna, jumped onto the counter and sniffed the papaya with disdain.

"You and me both," Elena said.

Marcus came home at seven, carrying takeout and the weight of something unspoken. They ate Thai food on the couch, not touching. The goldfish bowl sat between them on the coffee table like an accusation.

"We should talk about what happened," he said finally.

"It's a fish, Marcus."

"You know what I mean."

She did. They'd been trying for eighteen months. Every month, the same disappointment, the same statistics, the same specialists explaining what wasn't happening. The goldfish had been his idea—something small to take care of, a practice run. And now even that was dead.

"Maybe we're not meant to be parents," she said. Outside, lightning flickered, barely there. "Maybe the universe is trying to tell us something."

Marcus set down his carton. "Or maybe it's just a fish. Maybe sometimes things die and it doesn't mean anything. Maybe you're looking for patterns because you're afraid to just be sad."

She cut a piece of papaya. It was perfectly ripe, sweet and strange against her tongue. "You think I'm afraid of sadness?"

"I think you're afraid of hoping. I think you'd rather believe it's fate than try again and fail."

The room went quiet. Luna curled into a circle on the rug, purring like a small engine.

"You know what my father told me that day?" Elena said. "When the lightning hit? He said, 'Baby, storms pass. The game goes on.' He died alone. There was no game. There was just cancer."

Marcus reached across the space between them, his hand finding hers. "So?"

"So what if we're not meant to have a baby? What if this is it? What if it's just us, and Luna, and takeout on Tuesdays?"

"Then it's us," he said. "And we buy another fish. Or we don't. But we don't make it mean anything. We just live."

She looked at him—at the lines around his eyes, at the way he'd aged in the past two years, at how much she loved him even when he was right about things she didn't want to hear. Outside, thunder rumbled closer.

"Bubbles lived a good life," she said, and they both started laughing, really laughing, for the first time in months.