I couldn’t flush my dead goldfish. Instead, I left him in the bowl in the kitchen and I cry as I mix a tuna salad for lunch. My dishtowels smell like low tide. I keep his plastic toy squid on my bedside table and I dream of a heaven, underwater.

Carolyn Mainardi, a graduate of Boston University, lives and writes all around New England. Her short fiction appears in Danse Macabre and is forthcoming in Burn Magazine.