Blue Hour at the Empty Pool

The pool sat like a bruised eye in the twilight, its surface still and strange. Maria stood at the edge, clipboard in hand, trying to remember why she'd taken this job—apartment complex manager, custodian of other people's leaks and complaints. Her orange work uniform had faded somewhere between rust and sunset, much like her enthusiasm for the position.

"Cable's out again," the resident in 4B had told her that morning. "Can't watch my programs. Can't live like this."

She'd wanted to say: you won't live at all, not really, not if this is what living means to you. Instead she'd nodded and called the provider, her third such call that week. People and their cables, tethered to strangers' voices and manufactured drama.

Now she watched the pool drain slowly through the filtration system, a mechanical heartbeat that had been her only company since Jim died. Their old dog, Buster, used to swim here—leaping clumsily in, churning the water into foam, while Jim laughed from his lounge chair. That was three years ago. The cancer had moved through him like weather, unpredictable and absolute.

Maria set down her clipboard and tested the water with her toe. Still too cold for swimming. She thought about the grizzly bear exhibit she'd visited last weekend, standing before the glass as the massive animal paced its concrete kingdom, back and forth, back and forth—trapped in a routine it couldn't name but felt somehow, in the marrow of its being. She'd pressed her palm against the glass, wanting to apologize.

"Excuse me?"

A man stood at the gate—tall, probably mid-forties, carrying a toolbox. "Cable repair. They sent me to 4B."

Maria nodded, not trusting her voice. For a moment they stood there in the blue hour between light and dark, two strangers at the edge of an empty pool, while somewhere a dog barked at nothing in particular.

"You ever notice," he said, "how everything's either getting fixed or breaking? No in-between?"

She laughed before she could stop herself. "I've been waiting twenty years for someone to say that."

The pool pump hummed on, mechanical and patient. For the first time in months, Maria thought she might stay.