Cable Lines and Dead Lines

The cable splicer hummed in Marcus's hand as he balanced on the telephone pole, twenty feet above the Chicago street. His hair — what remained of it — whipped against his forehead, gray and thinning at forty-three. Below, the city churned with morning commuters, all of them running toward jobs they hated, running away from lives they'd barely started living.

He thought of Sarah last night, her dark hair spilled across his pillow, the way she'd traced the scar on his shoulder and asked why he never talked about his brother. Marcus had said nothing, just stared at the ceiling fan spinning like the blade of a helicopter evacuating the wounded.

"You're always swimming underwater with me," she'd whispered, turning away. "Even when we're in the same bed."

The radio crackled: "Unit 47, we've got a service outage on Halsted. Some bull about construction crews cutting the main line again."

Bull. Everything was bull. The corporate speeches about family values while they cut pensions. The promise that if he just worked harder, kept showing up, kept climbing poles and splicing cables in February ice storms, eventually he'd have something to show for it. His brother had believed that too, right up until the warehouse collapsed and buried him under three tons of steel and corporate negligence.

Marcus connected the final splice. The cable snapped taut.

His phone buzzed. Sarah, asking if he wanted to grab dinner. Maybe talk about real things for once.

He looked down at the street, at all those people running, swimming through their days, not realizing the cable that connected them was already fraying. Not understanding that the whole damn system was built on bull, and the only thing that mattered was who held your hand when the line finally snapped.

Marcus climbed down slowly, deliberately. He typed back: Yes. And meant it.