Cable to Nowhere

Mara had been running for three weeks when she found herself at the motel with the peeling paint sign that promised POOL in letters barely visible beneath rust. The pool itself was a chlorinated wound in the concrete, empty except for rainwater and a single papaya that had fallen from the overhanging tree, rotting slowly in the sun like something that had once been sweet.

She'd left David with nothing but a note and his half-finished thesis on existential dread in modern cinema. The irony wasn't lost on her—that she'd become the living embodiment of his academic preoccupations. Now she was staying in room 47, where the only entertainment was a television connected to a cable that dangled precariously from the wall, exposing copper wire like a nerve ending.

The papaya had been her mother's favorite fruit. Strange what surfaced when you stripped everything away—memories of breakfast in their kitchen in Manila, the way her mother would laugh when juice ran down her chin. Now Mara's mother was dead, David was probably quoting Camus to someone new, and here she was, thirty-four years old and technically a fugitive from her own life.

A man emerged from the room next to hers. He looked like he'd been running too—from what, she didn't ask. Some things were universal. He gestured toward the dangling cable.

"Bet that doesn't work," he said.

"Haven't tried."

"Want to find out together?"

Something in his voice suggested he wasn't talking about the television. The papaya continued its slow decay in the empty pool, and Mara realized she had stopped running sometime in the last minute without noticing. The cable swayed gently in the breeze, still disconnected, still promising nothing. But for the first time in three weeks, that seemed like enough.