Cable to Nowhere

The orange neon sign buzzed outside room 47, casting that sickly sweet glow through the cheap curtains. Maria sat on the edge of the stained bedspread, watching the coaxial cable snake along the baseboard like a dead worm, its silver connector staring at her like a blind eye.

He was forty minutes late. Again.

She stood up and walked to the window, pushing the curtain aside. Below, the pool sat drained and cracked, a concrete wound in the desert landscape. A NO SWIMMING sign hung crookedly on the chain-link fence, rusted through at one corner, flapping uselessly in the wind.

"Swimming," she whispered to herself. "That's what this was supposed to be." Not drowning. Not treading water. Swimming.

The first time they'd met, at that conference in Phoenix, David had used that exact metaphor. "We're both swimming upstream," he'd said over drinks that were the same aggressive shade of orange as this neon sign. "Might as well swim together."

She'd believed him. She'd believed a lot of things then.

The motel door rattled. Maria jumped, her heart performing that familiar, exhausted little skip.

But it was just the wind.

She sat back on the bed and traced the cable with her finger, following its path to where it disappeared behind the TV stand. A cable to nowhere. Just like this drive, just like this three-year whatever-it-was that had started with honest promise and curdled into texts at 2 AM, canceled plans, and lies about wives who didn't exist.

Outside, a car approached. Headlights swept across the empty pool, illuminating the leaves and debris at the bottom, catching that NO SWIMMING sign before disappearing.

The car kept driving.

Maria stood and walked to the mirror. The orange light washed her out, made her look like a stranger. She pulled the cable from the wall. The TV fuzzed into gray silence.

"Fuck this," she said.

She walked out, leaving the key on the dresser. The pool gate was unlocked. She stood at the deep end, looking down at the cracked concrete, and imagined water there. Imagined diving in and never coming up.

Instead, she got in her car and drove north toward the coast, toward real water, toward whatever came next. The orange sign grew small in her rearview, another blur of light in the desert darkness.