What We Keep in Water

The hat still sat on the hook by the door, his fedora with the sweat stain on the band that he swore gave it character. Three months after he left for her—twenty-six, he'd said, like that explained everything—I hadn't moved it. Couldn't. My therapist suggested it was about control, but she didn't understand that some objects ossify. They become architecture.

Tonight I bought a papaya from the bodega, the woman there asking if I was cooking for someone special. The fruit sat on my counter, alien and vibrating with some denied promise, while I watched Leonard swim in his bowl on the windowsill. My ex-husband's goldfish. The pet he'd forgotten when he ran—not walked, not drifted, but actually ran—to his new life. I'd kept Leonard alive through sheer spite at first, then through something like compassion.

The papaya ripened on the cutting board as I scooped out seeds that looked like living things. The bodega woman's question echoed. Special. The word landed like a stone. I realized I was waiting for something to matter, for the running and the swimming and the careful curation of artifacts to accumulate into some revelation about myself. But maybe there was no revelation. Maybe you just kept the fish alive. Maybe you just ate the fruit before it rotted.

I fed Leonard. I sliced the papaya. The hat stayed on its hook. Tomorrow I might throw it out. Or I might leave it there until it gathered dust enough to become something else entirely.