What We Keep in Water

The iPhone buzzed against the nightstand at 3 AM, the screen illuminating the empty side of the bed where David had slept for seven years. Now it was just a mattress, cold and vast as an ocean.

Mara's cat, Barnaby, leapt onto the duvet with deliberate indifference, his orange tail twitching. He'd been David's cat originally, a rescue from a shelter parking lot, but Barnaby had simply watched with his yellow eyes when David packed his boxes. The cat had chosen to stay. Sometimes Mara wondered if animals knew something about endurance that humans couldn't fathom — how to simply remain when everything else dissolved.

She threw on a coat and walked to the pond behind their apartment complex. There was a fox there sometimes, a vixen with a mangy coat and eyes that held zero sentiment. Mara had seen her at dusk, slipping through the chain-link fence like a rumor, carrying something dead in her mouth. Tonight the fox was there, drinking from the algae-thick water, and for a moment their eyes met across the distance. Then the fox vanished, not in panic but in that calculated way wild things have of disappearing.

On the kitchen counter, the goldfish bowl sat on its stand. David had bought it on impulse three years ago, after they'd argued about having children. The fish had outlasted two apartments, his job loss, her mother's death, and now their marriage. It swam in slow circles, mouth opening and closing in the water's artificial stillness.

Mara wondered about the nature of containers — how we put things in them expecting them to stay, to remain knowable and bounded. Relationships. Fish. Ourselves.

The iPhone lit up again. A message from him: Left my keys.

She typed back: Mail slot.

Then deleted it. Let him figure it out. Let him stand on the other side of the door he'd chosen to walk through.

Barnaby wound through her legs, purring like a small engine. In the bowl, the goldfish turned, its scales catching the light like something precious and entirely indifferent to being observed. Mara filled a glass of water and drank it standing at the sink, letting the cold shock her throat. Some things, she thought, you simply swallowed. Some things you kept swimming through, even when there was nowhere else to go.