We flush my sister’s goldfish down the toilet at three in the morning. She says the poor creature suffered a lot due to a condition inherent in all fish past twenty. I hold the flashlight, its beam stuttering over scales. The fish’s eyes look small, like black seeds. My mother wears the robe with ducklings on it and whisper-sings a song she makes up on the spot, something that was supposed to soothe us, something about rivers and stars. My sister kneels by the bowl, pressing her cheek to the ceramic rim, says goodbye to her fish in a voice that sounds more like a sad greeting. The goldfish floats in the low water, one fin arched, as if waving at us. My father stands in the hallway with a mug of coffee in his hand, watching us, maybe wishing he could say something meaningful, maybe feeling lucky he wasn’t the one who should let the fish go. I push the handle, gentle, and we watch the fish spin, tail dancing in the flush, red against white, growing smaller and smaller, until it’s gone.
Afterward, we all sit in the kitchen eating orange slices in silence, the whole house smelling rank like a rotten mouth, as the taste of rind comes off bitter on our tongues. My mother says she once had a koi angelfish named Lucky who only lasted six years, outliving her first marriage, outliving the apartment they’d lived in together, and my sister asks if Lucky ever went down the same way, but my mother only shrugs, peeling another orange. The night is heavy, summer thunder pressed flat against the glass. My father gets up and leaves his coffee in the sink. The clink echoes like a bell for bedtime. Later, in our rooms, my sister and I listen for the sound of water, for the fish swimming through the city’s dark veins, finding its way, maybe, to a river, maybe to the sea. We hope the journey is kind. We sleep, dreaming of scales and impossible rivers, our hands still sticky with the scent of oranges.