Chlorine and Chlorophyll

Elara placed the prenatal vitamin on her tongue, swallowed without water. Another day, another pill, another cycle that wouldn't take. The fertility specialist had said spinach—iron, folate, something about preparing the womb. So she ate it. Salads, smoothies, wilted with garlic over pasta. Her body was becoming something she didn't recognize, a vessel she was trying to fill.

"You're obsessive," Marcus said from the couch, not looking up from his phone. "It's just food."

He didn't know about the vitamins. He didn't know about the temperature charting, the cervical mucus checks, the increasingly desperate prayers to a god she'd stopped believing in at fifteen.

"I'm going to take Barnaby swimming," she said.

"The dog? Again?"

"His hips. The vet said hydrotherapy helps."

The truth was she needed to get out of the house. Away from Marcus's distance, away from the cramps that signaled another month of failure. She loaded Barnaby—he was old now, his muzzle gray, his eyes cloudy—into the backseat and drove to the reservoir.

The water was cold, April-chilled. She waded in fully clothed, jeans and heavy sweater soaking up the weight of memory. Her mother had swum here every morning until the cancer made it impossible. "Clears the head," she'd said, emerging from the water with silver hair plastered to her skull, alive in a way Elara had never seen her in the hospital.

Barnaby paddled beside her, his golden fur streaming like seaweed. He was a good dog. He didn't ask why she was crying. He didn't ask about the vitamins in her purse, the spinach in her refrigerator, the way her marriage was hollowing out from the inside.

She treaded water, watching the shore. Marcus's car remained parked at their house. He wouldn't come. He never came anymore.

"Maybe this is it," she whispered to the dog. "Maybe this is all there is."

Barnaby sneezed, shook water from his ears.

Elara thought about the spinach rotting in their crisper drawer. She thought about the vitamins expiring on their shelf. She thought about her mother, how she'd stopped swimming before she died, how the water had become something she couldn't face anymore.

The dog turned toward shore. Elara followed, heavy with water, with hopelessness, with something that might have been the beginning of letting go.