Chlorine and Orange Skies

The pool had been Elena's idea—she'd said it would bring them together, create memories. Now it was just David and the water, glass-still in the October twilight.

Forty-two and taking his morning vitamins like clockwork: A, D, omega-3, the little regiment of daily denial that his body was changing, that she was gone, that their son Marcus preferred his father's house across town. He swallowed them dry, standing in the kitchen that still smelled like her perfume—vanilla and something expensive he couldn't name.

David grabbed his phone and started running. He'd been running since the divorce papers came—through the neighborhood, past the house where the Hendersons still had their Christmas lights up in March, away from the silence of his own rooms. His knees clicked now, a reminder that he wasn't twenty-five anymore, when he'd played baseball with something resembling hope. He'd been good then, enough to catch a scout's eye once, before college and grades and eventually Elena had redirected him toward something practical.

He found himself at the park where he'd taught Marcus to hit a baseball. The backstop was rusted now, the field overgrown with weeds that looked dead or dying, he couldn't tell. He searched the tall grass until his fingers closed on something—a weathered baseball, half-buried in dirt. It might have been one of theirs. Might not have been. He held it anyway, thumb rubbing the leather until his skin caught on something rough.

On his way back, he stopped at the corner store. The clerk, a teenager with neon hair and dead eyes, didn't look up from her phone. David bought an orange, peeling it as he walked. The scent was sharp, sudden, transporting him back to childhood summer afternoons, watching games with his father, the way the sun had burned everything orange and gold and infinite.

The pool was still there when he returned. He stripped down to his boxers and waded in. The cold was immediate, shocking. He swam laps until his arms burned, until he couldn't feel anything anymore, until the water had washed away the orange sunset and the baseball memories and the empty routine of vitamins and tomorrow.

When he finally pulled himself out, dripping and shivering, David saw that the pool light had flickered on—soft blue underwater, making the whole thing look like some distant galaxy he could float away into, if he just stopped trying to swim for long enough.

He stood there a long time before going inside to start the coffee maker, to line up the vitamins for tomorrow, to pretend that eventually the running would lead somewhere new.