Breathing Underwater

After Elena left, I became the sort of man who exists in photographs he doesn't remember taking. I woke at 6:03 AM each day, brewed coffee in the silence she'd left behind, and drove to the office where I designed swimming pools for people who could still afford them. That was before the **zombie** apocalypse—not the cinematic kind with rotting corpses and running screams, but the slow unraveling that began with the pharmaceutical merger and ended with half the city walking around with that glazed, hungry look.

I should have left Portland when the first reports surfaced. Instead, I stayed, tweaking blueprints for infinity edges and water features that seemed increasingly absurd. The dating **pool** had already dried up before the outbreak; now it was just another source of potential infection. I stopped going to the **padel** club where Elena and I used to play Sunday matches, though sometimes I'd drive past and see survivors smashing balls against the chain-link fence, desperate for something that felt like the before times.

The papaya tree in our backyard kept producing. Elena had planted it, convinced we'd make smoothies and pretend we weren't lonely. Now the fruit fell onto the patio and rotted, sweet fermentation filling the evenings. I watched from the kitchen window with a glass of whiskey, wondering if this was what hell looked like: abundant **papaya** and no one left to share it with.

The goldfish came into my life on a Tuesday, when the neighbor's kid—missing his parents, carrying nothing but a plastic bag—asked if I could watch 'Mr. Bubbles' while he scouted for supplies. I agreed, mostly because the kid had Elena's eyes. That night, I sat in the dark watching the **goldfish** pulse in its bowl, thinking about how breathing underwater would feel like this: slow, invisible, terrified.

Three months later, the power grid failed for good. I ate the last papaya, cracked open the goldfish bowl, and walked the fish three blocks to what remained of Laurelhurst Park. The pond was choked with algae, but I figured Mr. Bubbles deserved a fighting chance.

'You're free,' I told the fish, watching it disappear into the murk. 'Go find the others.'

That's when I heard it: the sound of a ball hitting a racket, rhythmic and impossible. I followed the noise to the padel courts, where a woman in running clothes was playing against the backboard, hitting shot after shot with perfect, furious form. She stopped when she saw me, racket raised like a weapon.

'You any good?' she called out.

'I used to be,' I said. 'Before.'

She tossed me a ball. 'Show me.'

I caught it, felt the strange relief of having something in my hands again. The zombie moans drifted from downtown, but for the first time in forever, I didn't want to disappear.