One

He was alone. Or, at least, mostly alone. He had a goldfish in a small bowl that kept him company at night in his small three room apartment, although recently the goldfish had begun to turn an unnatural shade of pink, and this worried the man. As it was his only companion, desperately wanted it to stay alive, to live with him until his hair turned gray, until his eyesight grew dim, until his dying day, and then, as the fish would surely die of a broken heart to see it’s masters demise, it too would pass and come to rest alongside the Man in his deep and peaceful grave.
When the color of the fish’s scales turned from gold to that pale pink, he carried the fish around the apartment with him in its small glass bowl, periodically checking to make sure it was still languidly following its well worn water track. It was beside him when he cooked, when he was reading, when he slept and when he bathed. As the Man had groceries and other necessities delivered, he had little need to leave the apartment and as such, spent every waking and sleeping hour in the company of the fish. He only ever left the flat to drop manila envelopes stuffed with stories and poems into the blue and brown mailbox that lived on the curb just outside his building. This was the only time he was ever apart from the fish, and during that seemingly endless journey down four flights of stairs (the elevator had broken years ago) and out into the city, he held back a constant and bitter wave of anxiety. It was only upon his return to the flat, only when he laid his eyes upon his silent friend, that this wave subsided and peace was found.
He was a writer or moderate renown, having spent the better part of his young life honing his craft. While he had never written anything of length or, in his opinion, true merit, he had written a great deal of well received short stories, published in the likes of The Chronicle and Literature Abounds! He had received many letters from admirers, mostly women, but he never responded to them. He would read them, carefully and slowly, and when he was done he would close his eyes and create their faces, their lives and their futures. It was a ritual that made his existence seems fuller, more populated by those who would care, and less by the sound of passing cars and clacking shoes far below his window.
Along with the usual fare of pulp and poetry, the man had been working on a collection of short stories. This was perhaps a misguided attempt at emulating his favorite author, and while the ideas had come easy and quick, they had been nearly impossible to put to paper. He had set the number of stories for this collection at nine, and during the writing of the fourth story he had looked over at the fish bowl and found, much to his horror, the his only friend had succumbed to his strangely subtle pink sickness.
He left the fish in the bowl for days, carrying it around as he had in a diluted and strange attempt at preserving what little contact he had left with reality. When the bowl began to smell, he brought it into the bathroom and flushed the foul smelling water, and his friend, down the drain. There was no eulogy, no lovingly cared for grave, and when it was done he placed the bowl in the highest cabinet he could find and then went to his room and laid down.
For weeks he lived in a grief induced coma of sorts. He was awake; he cooked, cleaned, bathed and wrote, but was unaware of all of these happenings. His appearance had begun to deteriorate. All of his life he had been a well kempt person; clean shaven, well dressed and polite. His loneliness and waking coma had created visually disturbing kind of metamorphosis, and he found himself disregarding all aspects of his appearance. He grew the outline of a beard, and when he dressed, he dressed as if someone was holding a gun up to his head and telling him to “Hurry! Quickly! Now!” He was the antithesis of the butterfly with its transformation from crawling horror to beauty. His cocoon yielded a grim deaths head, not a glowing monarch.
His collapse from gentle, albeit fragile, happiness had been a sure and swift one. Eventually, his loneliness became too much, and he became a man that was alive, but was unaware of its humanity. Suicide was considered, as it often is in such cases of hopeless despair, but he had neither the courage nor the proper knowledge to properly execute such a delicate maneuver. He abandoned his collection of short stories and eventually writing entirely. After some time of receiving calls from various press men asking for interviews, asking where he had gone, the man snipped his telephone line and piled a large pile of unfinished work in the highest cupboard, next to the fishbowl. Having severed all ties with what made him who he was, the man resigned himself to a relentless pursuit of nothing. Relative spontaneity begot classical routine begot rote memorization begot cold apathy begot humdrum monotony. Life had become a black sleep, one to never wake up from. His consciousness had become moot, and, in the years to come, he would be unable to recall this purest form of grief, although it was during this black and hopeless period that the most important person of his life was beginning to take shape.