Cable to Nowhere

The oranges in the bowl had been there since Tuesday. Now, on Friday, their peels had grown dim, like the light in Mara's eyes when she looked at him. Daniel watched her from the kitchen doorway, her silhouette framed against the gray window that had forgotten how to let sunlight through.

"The cable's out again," she said without turning. "Third time this week."

Daniel nodded, though she couldn't see him. He'd been swimming through debt for months now, drowning in mortgage payments and her medical bills that kept arriving like unwanted relatives. The cable bill was just another anchor.

He moved to the TV and traced the coaxial cable behind the entertainment center. His father's voice echoed in his head: *A man who can't fix things isn't a man at all.* His father had coached baseball, lived by the philosophy that problems were like pitches — you either hit them or you walked away.

Mara appeared in the doorway, holding a bowl of wilted spinach. "I was going to make salad. But it's all rotten now."

"Everything rots," Daniel said, then immediately regretted it.

She set the bowl down carefully, as if handling something fragile. "Do you remember our first summer? That apartment with the broken air conditioning? We were so broke we couldn't even afford fans, so we'd go swimming in that murky pond behind the complex at midnight?"

"We were young."

"We were happy," she corrected. "Or am I remembering it wrong?"

Daniel found himself back at that pond, feeling her slippery skin against his in the water, both of them laughing at nothing, everything ahead of them. They'd shared a bruised orange on the shore afterward, sucking the juice from each other's fingers.

"The cable's not the problem, is it?" he said quietly.

"No." She touched the withered spinach leaves. "But I don't know what is anymore."

Outside, somewhere in the distance, a baseball cracked against a bat — a sound of spring, of beginnings. Daniel looked at his wife and saw, with terrible clarity, that some things couldn't be fixed with tightening or replacement or patience. Some things simply ended, like cable service, like seasons, like the brightness of an orange left too long in the bowl.