The burbot

Mariah breathed on her entwined fingers in the twilit dining room. On the table, two candle flames were engaged in a flickering battle to the table surface, and casting epileptic shadows against the painted plaster walls. Mariah faced Mark in the dimness and pondered the harlequinade that was those evening's events. Their anniversary.

Things were not good. Mark worked late at the practice almost every night, and was becoming etiolated and morose from the effort. Their love-making grew rare, and he never initiated it.  Dispatches of gifts and flowers came only as articles of contrition. Their cherished in-jokes and laughter were being slowly nudged out by prickly misunderstandings and episodic bickering. As they sat there over their cooling meals on wedding gift China, Mariah examined Mark's face for a relic; a hint of a smile perhaps, or a familiar bend of an eyebrow. But all she found were the unfamiliar features of an exhausted stranger.

Which is why the evening was so unusual. Mark had arrived with a spurt of energy she had not seen in months. For a gift, he brought Mariah an antique flagon, and clunked it ceremoniously on the table as she watched bemused. He remonstrated at length about recent management decisions at Lota, Lota & Walker and outlined his own ambitions on partnership. He sucked red wine through his teeth, while Mariah idly pushed around her uneaten burbot with a fork.

"Poor man's lobster," was how Mark laughingly described it.

And when he got to the matter at hand, clearing his throat and outlining -- in intricate detail -- the inevitability of the failure of their relationship and the actions they needed to take now to mitigate further damage to both their egos, she listened in silence. Mark waxed bathetic, painting maudlin tableaus of aged couples fastened to one another in contempt: getting enraged about grocery expenditures at family gatherings, or relishing the opportunity to correct one another in public, or locking eyes across a quiet dining room table wondering where they had gone wrong.

And at this last point Mariah felt the blood and associated warmth slide away from her fingers. She looked at the uneaten fish on her plate. It reminded her of Mark. The barbels on its face resembled his wispy moustache, and they both had the same small dark sad eyes. And like the fish, he had a long slender frame. She considered his lanky body, with arms at his sides, flailing through foaming white rapids. She smiled.

"Poor man's lobster." She said.