Cable to the Zombie Pool

The palm tree outside room 217 cast long shadows across the cracked concrete, its fronds like skeleton fingers against the moonlight. Elena sat at the edge of the pool, her legs dangling in the water that hadn't been properly filtered in weeks. The motel was dying—she could feel it in the way the neon sign flickered, in the mold spreading across the ceiling tiles, in the absolute silence of the parking lot.

She'd been a zombie for three months now, since David left. Moving through motions, eating food that tasted like cardboard, sleeping in fits and starts. Her hair had grown out, dark roots pushing back the blonde she'd maintained for twenty years of marriage. It seemed appropriate somehow—this slow return to her younger self, the woman she'd been before she learned what disappointment really meant.

The cable guy was supposed to come between noon and four. That had been yesterday. Now it was nearly midnight, and she was still watching static on the screen, waiting for something to connect.

"You're going to fall in," a voice said.

Elena jumped. A woman stood at the pool's edge—maybe sixty, silver hair cut short, wearing a silk kimono over what looked like a swimsuit. She held a glass of something amber.

"Maybe I want to," Elena said.

The woman sat beside her, close enough that Elena could smell gin and expensive perfume. "I'm Marian. Room 219."

"Elena. 217."

"Ah." Marian took a sip. "Hiding from something or waiting for it to catch up?"

"Both."

Marian nodded, staring at the pool's dark surface. "My husband died two years ago. I spent the first year feeling like a zombie. The second year, I started doing whatever I wanted. This week? I wanted to see where the highway ends."

Elena looked at her—really looked. The laugh lines around eyes that had seen everything, the hands that had probably held children, then grandchildren, then just a glass of gin and the steering wheel of a car headed nowhere in particular.

"The cable guy never came," Elena said suddenly. "I've been sitting in my room waiting for the television to work so I wouldn't have to think."

Marian laughed, and it was the most alive sound Elena had heard in months. "Honey, the cable's not going to save you. Neither is this pool." She stood up, held out her hand. "But I know a place twenty miles south that serves breakfast at 3 AM. And the radio works in my car."

Elena looked at the palm tree, the dark pool, the distant highway where someone was always going somewhere else. Then she took Marian's hand and let herself be pulled up.

"I need to change," she said.

Marian smiled. "Take your time. The night's young, and we're not dead yet."