Chlorine and Silence

The pool reflected the bruised purple of twilight, its surface undisturbed until Marcus's chocolate lab, Barnaby, bounded through the sliding glass door and launched himself into the water with spectacular, unearned joy. Chlorine splashed onto Sarah's vintage rug. She watched the droplets darken the fabric, thinking about how some things stain permanently while others, like her marriage, simply fade into the background.

She gripped her iPhone until her knuckles whitened, scrolling through messages from David—each one more carefully neutral than the last. We need to talk. Can't tonight. Tomorrow. The cable charging his phone lay coiled on the nightstand like a sleeping snake, its glowing pulse the only sign of life in a bedroom that had grown uncomfortably quiet over the past six months.

'That dog,' Marcus said, laughing as he fished Barnaby out with a pool net. 'He never remembers he can't swim until he's already drowning.' He said it with the casual observation of someone whose life had always gone according to plan, whose biggest problem was a wet dog and a ruined party.

Sarah swallowed her vitamin D supplement with lukewarm champagne, thinking about how the doctor had recommended it for seasonal affective disorder, as if her melancholy could be cured by something you could buy at CVS. She'd been taking them for three months, but the darkness still arrived each evening like an unwanted guest, settling into the corners of her consciousness while everyone else laughed and clinked glasses.

David still wasn't back from his 'emergency' at work. The cable box flickered with a sports broadcast she had no interest in watching. Barnaby shook himself dry, spraying chlorinated water across the patio, and everyone laughed—everyone except Sarah, who felt suddenly, overwhelmingly solitary surrounded by people who knew nothing of the quiet demolition happening within the walls of her supposedly perfect life.

She thought about texting David again, asking when he'd come home, but the cable between them had grown too thin to carry real conversation anymore. Instead she watched the pool's surface settle back into artificial calm, wondering how much longer she could tread water before exhaustion set in, wondering if anyone would notice when she finally stopped swimming.