What We Keep in Water

The goldfish — an unremarkable comet named Kevin — outlasted them all. Three years of marriage, flushed in an afternoon. Elena hovered over the bowl on her ex-husband's countertop, watching the orange scales flash in the morning light. Marcus was already gone, off to start his new life with someone who didn't have panic attacks in grocery stores.

"Take him," he'd said during the division of possessions, not bothering to look up from his phone. "You always fed him anyway."

She should have left the fish. That would have been the cleaner break, the decisive choice. But here she was, at 8 AM on a Tuesday, stealing a pet she'd never wanted in the first place.

Elena's hair still held the shape of whatever position she'd slept in — mashed against one side of her head, flattened on the other. She'd stopped coloring it six months ago, when the marriage had already begun its quiet unraveling. The gray at her temples had come in stubbornly, like weeds through pavement. Marcus had suggested she "do something about it" during their last anniversary dinner, his eyes flicking toward the waitress's sleek, glossy ponytail.

In the bedroom, she stripped the bed. The sheets smelled like nothing anymore — no Marcus, no her, no them. Just laundry detergent and the faint, persistent scent of the dog, Buster, who now slept at Marcus's sister's place because the new apartment didn't allow pets. Buster had been her dog first, a rescue from a shelter in Austin, but somewhere along the way, he'd become "their" dog, and then somehow, just Marcus's dog.

She found an orange in the kitchen, rolling around in the crisper drawer. Marcus had started eating them for breakfast after his doctor warned about cholesterol. Elena peeled it, the citrus stinging her eyes, which were already raw from crying or lack of sleep or both. The sections were dry and pulpy.

"Well," she said to the empty kitchen, "at least the fish will have a friend."

She packed the fish bowl into a box with "KITCHEN" written on the side in sharpie. Inside, Kevin swam in slow, indifferent circles, his orange body catching the light. He'd been a carnival prize from a date they'd never actually gone on — Marcus had won him and brought him home as a joke that turned into a fixture, then into a relationship test she was always failing.

Her phone buzzed. Marcus, of course. "Did you take the fish?"

Elena looked at Kevin, suspended in his small, translucent world. He had no idea everything had changed. He would keep swimming, keep eating, keep being orange in the light, because fish didn't have the luxury of falling apart.

"Yeah," she typed back. "He's with me now."

She drove away with the fish buckled into the passenger seat, orange pulp still stuck to her fingers, wondering which of them would outlast the grief, or if they were all just swimming in circles waiting for someone to remember to feed them.