Currents

The apartment had gone quiet in that particular way that only happens when someone else's things are gone. Sarah stood at the kitchen counter, her hand hovering over the orange prescription bottle. She'd been taking the same **vitamin** D supplement for three years because David had read somewhere that it helped with seasonal affective disorder, and now she was down to her last pill and the person who'd put her on them was living in a different time zone.

She dry-swallowed it anyway.

The **cable** from the wall to the television had been fraying for months, exposing copper that glinted like a threat whenever she walked past. David had meant to fix it. That's what he said about a lot of things. We'll fix it, we'll talk about it, we'll work on us. Instead, he'd packed his things into boxes and driven away, leaving her with a loose connection to the outside world and the realization that some things can't be spliced back together.

She went for a swim at 11 PM. The pool was empty, the water still and black as ink. As a teenager, she'd been on the swim team, the kind of girl who could cut through water without making a sound. She'd stopped after college, stopped doing a lot of things, and it had taken David leaving for her to remember how it felt to be submerged in something that demanded nothing from her but to keep moving.

**Swimming** laps in the fluorescent quiet, she thought about the night David told her he was unhappy. How he'd said it gently, as if softening the blow would make it land differently. How she'd nodded and asked if he wanted the rest of the Thai food they'd ordered, as if her heart wasn't being hollowed out sentence by sentence.

When she surfaced, gasping, a man was standing at the edge of the pool. Old, maybe seventy, with a swimming cap that matched his trunks.

"You know," he said, "I used to swim every morning with my wife. Thirty years. She died two years ago. I still come here."

Sarah pulled herself out of the water, dripping on the concrete. "I'm sorry."

"She hated this pool," he continued, adjusting his goggles. "Too much chlorine, she said. But she came because I asked. That's what you do, isn't it? You show up."

The next morning, Sarah saw the **fox** in the alley behind her building. It was young, its coat still patchy with winter fur, nosing through a garbage bag. It looked up at her, eyes bright and unafraid, something wild that had found a way to survive in the spaces between buildings, between intention and abandonment, between what you think will happen and what actually does.

It reminded her of herself, or maybe of how she wanted to be—not tamed by the architecture of someone else's life. Not anymore.

She went back inside, called the cable company, and asked them to send someone to fix the connection. Then she sat at the kitchen counter and ordered a new bottle of vitamins, and for the first time in months, she didn't check her phone to see if David had messaged her back.