Chlorine and Regret

The empty pool sat below his second-story balcony like a scar in the earth, its drained bottom scattered with dead leaves and the skeleton of a beach umbrella. Frank stood on the concrete edge, a handful of supplements in his palm—vitamin D, B-complex, something for joint health he'd bought on impulse at a pharmacy where the clerk had looked through him.

He swallowed them dry.

Three months since Sarah left. Six since his father died. The Florida heat pressed against him, heavy and intimate, like a lover who'd overstayed their welcome. He'd come here to clear his head, but the motel's drained pool only reflected his own hollowed-out version of fatherhood. His son had stopped returning calls two years ago. Something about baseball, about how Frank had never made a single game, not even the championship. The irony was that Frank had abandoned his own minor-league career for a marriage that ultimately evaporated like sweat in this tropical air.

The refrigerator in his room hummed with the insistence of a dying appliance. Inside, a bag of spinach had turned to black slime, forgotten among takeout containers and condiment packets. He stared at it, this living thing he'd let rot through neglect, and realized with a cold clarity that made his chest ache: he was forty-seven years old, and he had never kept anything alive.

Not a plant. Not a promise. Not a love.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand. Unknown number. He let it ring.

Frank walked to the balcony again. Below, in the pool's deep end, a small lizard darted across the concrete, immune to the existential weight of drained things. It paused on a rusted drain, then scurried up the sloped wall toward sunlight.

Frank watched it go. He thought about calling his son. He thought about throwing away the rotting spinach. He thought about learning to want things again, even if wanting meant risking the particular ache of losing them.

The lizard reached the pool's edge and disappeared into the manicured hedges. Frank stood there a long time, his palm resting on the railing, as the Florida sun moved across the sky, indifferent to the small, quiet work of beginning again.