Chlorine and Cable TV

The pool at the Sunrise Motor Lodge was shaped like a kidney, staining the same color as the aged organ it resembled. Mark sat at the edge, legs submerged in water that smelled like chemical childhood and bad decisions.

He was forty-seven now. The age where men bought sports cars or left their wives. He'd done neither. Instead, he'd booked a week off work to stare at cable television in a motel three towns over, swallowing vitamin D supplements like secular communion wafers.

"You need more sun," Dr. Patel had said, clicking her pen. "Or the supplements. Your bones are whispering, Mark."

His bones weren't the only thing whispering.

A woman surfaced at the deep end, sleek as a seal. She pulled herself from the water, and Mark watched the way her wet hair plastered against her skull—dark ropes of it, nothing like Sarah's fraying blonde. Everything was different now. The elastic of their life together had stretched beyond recovery.

The woman caught him watching. She didn't smile. She gathered her towel and disappeared toward room 117, where the cable junction box hissed and sparked with whatever programming nobody watched anymore.

Mark's phone buzzed. Sarah again. *Are you coming back?* *Did you find what you needed?* *The dog won't eat.*

He'd told her he needed space. What he needed was for her to stop leaving her vitamin bottles on the bathroom counter, the ones she took because she read somewhere they prevented aging. As if anything could.

He'd stopped swimming after college. Now his body remembered only the forward motion of time, not water. He dipped below the surface, holding his breath until his chest burned, until the cable connection in his mind went fuzzy with static. When he emerged, gasping, the world was still there. The pool was still shaped like a dying organ. The woman's wet footprints still led toward room 117.

Mark stood up. His hair was thinning. His bones were whispering. But he could still feel something, which was more than he'd been able to say for months.

He walked toward the junction box, toward the hissing cable that promised connection or entertainment or something worth watching, and knocked on the door.