Catfish

The cat watched from the windowsill as Elena sliced the papaya, its jeweled flesh weeping onto the cutting board. Just like her marriage had wept—slowly, imperceptibly, until everything was wet and ruined.

She'd taken up swimming at the Y because the water muffled her thoughts. Sixty laps of chlorine-silence where she couldn't hear Mark's voice saying he needed space, or the way he'd stopped touching her somewhere around year seven.

"You're like a zombie," her sister had said last week. "Just going through the motions."

Elena ate a piece of papaya. It was sweet and cloying, tropical and wrong for this gray Chicago winter. She'd bought it on impulse, trying to remember the woman she'd been when she and Mark had vacationed in Costa Rica—before his promotion, before the infertility treatments, before the long silences at dinner.

The cat, whose real name was Buster but whom she called Catfish because he hovered at the edge of everything, jumped onto the counter and batted at the papaya seeds.

"You miss him too," she said, scratching behind his ears.

She didn't.

On her way to the pool, she passed the baseball field where teenagers practiced, their shouts sharp in the cold air. Mark had loved baseball. Season tickets. Statistical analysis of player performance. The whole performance of fandom. Elena had sat beside him for six seasons, wearing a cap she'd secretly hated, nursing lukewarm beer while he explained infield dynamics.

She'd thought being a zombie was a temporary state. Grief as a waiting room. But lately she wondered if this was just who she'd become: someone who floated through days, whose only passion was the rhythmic thrash of water, whose cat gave her more affection than her husband ever had.

At the Y, she slid into the pool. The cold hit her like revelation. Maybe being a zombie wasn't about being dead inside. Maybe it was about finally being free to haunt her own life.

She swam harder than usual, imagining she was cutting through something thicker than water. Behind her goggles, the world blurred and refracted—cat and papaya and baseball and everything she was supposed to want dissolving into blue.

For the first time in months, she didn't think about Mark at all. She just swam, alive and breathless and entirely alone.