Concrete Bottoms

The pool was empty at 3 AM, which was exactly why Elena chose it. She needed to see what lay beneath the surface without the distortion of ripples and splashing tourists. Her marriage had ended six months ago, and still she found herself gravitating toward bodies of water, as if they might offer some clarity she couldn't find in therapy sessions or well-meaning friends' advice.

She'd brought an orange from the hotel breakfast buffet, peeling it slowly as she sat on the deck chair. The citrus scent cut through the heavy chlorine smell, sharp and bright and uncomplicated. She watched the peels fall onto the concrete, thinking about how her husband had always made fun of her for eating oranges the "messy" way, peeling them into ragged strips instead of the neat spiral he'd learned from his mother. It was the kind of small, meaningless difference that had somehow become emblematic of everything that had slowly unraveled between them.

A cat appeared from somewhere—maybe the garden, maybe the kitchens—and padded silently toward her. It was an old tabby, missing half an ear, with eyes that had seen too much. Elena held out a section of orange, but the cat merely sniffed it with disdain and settled onto the warm concrete beside her chair.

"I know," she said. "Not much of an offering."

The cat didn't respond, which she appreciated. It just curled into a crescent shape and closed its eyes, trusting her or simply too tired to care about danger either way. Elena looked at the pool again, where the underwater lights cast everything in an artificial blue glow. For months she'd been waiting for life to feel normal again, for some threshold to be crossed after which she'd be "healed." But maybe there was no threshold. Maybe you just kept sitting by pools at 3 AM, eating oranges and making friends with stray cats, and eventually you realized that this—that strange, quiet, slightly lonely existence—was just what life looked like now.

The cat purred, a low rumble that vibrated through the concrete and into the soles of her feet. Elena finished her orange, wiped her sticky fingers on her dress, and finally, for the first time in months, felt exactly as sad as she actually was.