Breathing Under Everything

The pool at the Vera Resort was supposed to be turquoise. Instead, under the merciless Mexican sun, it had turned the color of a wound—something between pale green and sickly yellow. Elena floated on her back, staring up at the relentless blue sky, while Marcus sat at the edge, his legs submerged to the calves, nursing a drink with a skewered papaya wedge that had sat untouched for twenty minutes.

"You're doing it again," Marcus said, not looking at her.

"Doing what?"

"That thing. Where you go somewhere else. Where I could be talking to a zombie for all the difference it makes."

Elena stopped swimming, stood up. Water streamed from her hair down her shoulders. The resort was mostly empty—weekday, off-season, the kind of liminal space where marriages came to be examined or quietly dismantled. They'd been married seven years. The numbness had started around year four, gradual and insidious, like blood loss you didn't notice until you were too weak to stand.

"I'm right here," she said, which was a lie and they both knew it.

"Are you?" He finally looked at her. His eyes were the same warm brown she'd fallen in love with, but now they just looked tired. "Because it feels like I'm sharing a bed with someone who's already left. You're just going through the motions, El. Wake up, work, eat, sleep. You're not even swimming anymore. You're just not drowning."

She climbed out of the pool, water dripping onto the concrete, pooling around her feet. She walked over to where he sat and took the papaya from his glass. It was warm and overly sweet against her tongue—sun-ripened, fermenting slightly at the edges. The taste was sudden and shocking and alive.

"I don't want to be a zombie," she said softly. "I don't know how to stop being one."

Marcus set his drink down and took her wet hand in his dry one. "We start somewhere. We start here."

She nodded. The papaya taste lingered—sweet, strange, the first real thing she'd tasted in years.