What We Keep in Water

Arthur watches the goldfish drift in its bowl, the same three inches of water it's inhabited for seven years. Sarah bought it the week after the diagnosis, when she still remembered his name.

"Arthur?" she calls from the bedroom. "Arthur, there's a fox in the garden."

He stands slowly, knees clicking. The fox comes every evening now — a rust-red shadow moving through the overgrown hydrangeas. Sarah thinks it's her father's dog, returned. Arthur stopped correcting her months ago.

In the bedroom, Sarah sits before her vanity. She's cut her hair again. Silver tufts litter the floor like fallen feathers. At seventy-two, she's taken to shearing it whenever the mood strikes, a rebellion against the slow erosion of control.

"Your father's dog is waiting," she says, combing fingers through the jagged stubble.

"I'll feed him."

Arthur finds his fedora on the nightstand — felt, sweat-stained, older than their marriage. He wears it only when he visits the cemetery, but today he pulls it low over his thinning crown. Some performance of dignity required.

The fox watches from the patio as Arthur scatters stale bread crusts. They've developed an understanding: it eats, he observes. Neither acknowledges the other directly. A marriage of convenience, he thinks.

Inside, Sarah has moved to the goldfish. She taps the glass. The fish blinks its expressionless eye.

"Father always said fish can't feel pain," she murmurs. "Did I tell you that?"

"Yes."

"He was wrong, though. Everything feels something."

Arthur watches her reflection in the bowl: distorted, wavering, the way she must see him now through the water of her disease. He removes his hat, runs a hand over his own sparse hair, and places the fedora on her head.

It swallows her small face. She looks like a child playing dress-up, or an old woman disappearing into someone else's life.

"Father's dog is gone," she says, adjusting the brim.

Arthur waits. Sometimes she remembers the fox was a fox. Sometimes she forgets the fox entirely. Sometimes she remembers Arthur is Arthur.

"He'll come back tomorrow," he says.

Outside, twilight deepens. The fox has moved on, and Arthur knows somewhere in the circuits of her brain, Sarah is moving on too, inch by inch, leaving him behind in this house with its clocks and photographs and one goldfish swimming endless circles in water that is never quite clean enough.

He kisses her forehead through the felt.

"I'll be here," he says.

She smiles at something over his shoulder, something he cannot see. The fish swims on, forgetting everything it's ever known, three seconds at a time.