Conduction

The coaxial cable lay severed between us, a black snake cut clean through—the way we should have been three years ago. Outside, lightning fractured the Seattle sky, illuminating the apartment we'd filled with borrowed time and IKEA furniture we swore we'd replace.

Marcus stood by the window, silhouette backlit by another flash. 'The internet's down,' he said, as if that was what was wrong.

'Everything's down,' I replied, staring at the goldfish bowl on the bookshelf. Leonard swam in endless circles, orange and oblivious, his three-second memory a kindness I envied. He didn't remember the fight about the wedding venue, or the one about the apartment neither of us wanted but both refused to leave. He just swam through water that was slowly growing cloudy, the same way we swam through days that had lost their clarity.

'I can fix the cable,' Marcus said, turning toward me.

'Some things don't get fixed.' I slid the divorce papers across the coffee table. They'd been sitting in my bag for two weeks—a payload I'd been carrying like radioactive material, terrified to detonate.

The thunder finally caught up to the light, shaking the windows. Leonard darted to the bottom of his bowl.

Marcus picked up the papers. His expression didn't change, but his hands did—a slight tremor, like he was handling something fragile. Or dangerous. 'I thought we were happy enough,' he said, and the word 'enough' was a blade twisting in the space between us.

'We were surviving. There's a difference.' I thought about all the ways people stay in things that stopped working—like a cable you keep splicing together even though the signal gets worse each time. Eventually you have to admit nothing's coming through anymore.

He nodded once, then set the papers down and walked to the fish bowl. 'What happens to Leonard?'

'You keep him,' I said. 'He likes you better anyway.'

Another lightning strike, closer this time. The power flickered, died, leaving us in sudden dark.

In the silence that followed, I heard water sloshing gently as Leonard continued his revolutions—scales of orange in a bowl that was too small, circling the same walls, thinking he was going somewhere. Some of us learn faster than others.

'I'll cable the box back up before you go,' Marcus said into the darkness.

'Don't bother,' I said, standing to pack my bag. 'The connection was lost a long time ago.'