What We Keep in the Water

The goldfish - orange as the sunset she always pointed out but never stayed to watch - has been alive for three years. Two months longer than the marriage. I should've flushed him when she left. Instead, I'm at the laundromat at 11 PM on a Tuesday, watching his bowl ride shotgun on the folding table while my clothes tumble in the industrial **water** behind glass.

Her baseball glove sits on the floor between my boots. She forgot it. I used to love watching her play, the way she leaned into every pitch like she was waiting for something to hit her. Sometimes she struck out swinging. Sometimes she connected and the ball went sailing into places neither of us could follow.

The **dog** - part husky, part something unidentifiable - belonged to the couple in apartment 4B. He's here too, tied to a chair, his owner flirting with the woman folding sheets near the change machine. The dog keeps looking at me like he knows. His eyes are the color of the sky on days everything goes wrong.

She never wanted a dog. Too much responsibility, she said. But she'd cried at that pet store, staring at a dying goldfish in a cloudy tank, so I bought it for her. Seventy-five watts of artificial light heating a five-dollar creature swimming in circles.

"You know," a woman says, appearing beside me. She's folding a fitted sheet with the easy confidence of someone who's been doing laundry alone for years. "My ex took the coffee maker. I got the debts."

"She forgot her glove," I say.

"She'll come back for it."

"No." The fish bumps against the glass, his mouth opening and closing in silent accusation. "She's not coming back."

The washer beeps. I transfer everything to the dryer, pulling the wet clothes from the dark drum. Her shirts, my shirts, everything tangled together. Somewhere between the spin cycle and the fold, they'd stopped being hers and mine and started just being laundry.

Outside, the streetlights flicker. The dog in 4B howls at something none of us can hear. The goldfish keeps swimming. I drop three quarters into the machine and press start, watching my clothes tumble in the heat, everything becoming something new.