Currents

The makeup trailer still smelled of latex and fake blood, the ghost of a thousand zombies clinging to Marcus's clothes when he finally came home. Sarah had stopped asking how his day was six months ago. She knew the answer anyway: more gore, more exhaustion, more of the same industry that had eaten him alive.

She'd taken to night swimming at the YMCA, the only time she could feel anything anymore. The pool was empty at 11 PM, the water a glassy obsidian that reflected the harsh fluorescent lights. She'd slip into the chlorine silence and swim until her muscles burned, until the living dead feeling that had become her marriage dissolved into something like peace.

"You're never here," Marcus said one night, catching her as she returned, hair still wet, towel-dried and shivering.

"I'm here every night," she countered. "You're the one working fourteen-hour days painting rotting flesh on extras."

"It's for us," he said, but the words sounded hollow, rehearsed.

The storm broke two nights later while she was swimming. Thunder rattled the high windows, and then lightning split the sky, turning the water momentarily brilliant white. In that flash, she saw him standing at poolside — Marcus, not a ghost, not a stranger, just her husband looking wrecked and small.

She swam to the edge, treading water. The lightning flashed again, illuminating the hollows under his eyes, the way he'd aged a decade in two years.

"I feel like a zombie," he said quietly, and something cracked in her chest. "But not the kind I paint. The other kind. Walking around, not really alive."

Sarah pulled herself up to sit on the edge, water streaming from her skin. The air was electric with the storm, with possibility, with the sudden realization that they were both drowning in different ways.

"Marcus," she said, and his name felt heavy in her mouth, unused. "Get in."

"What?"

"Swimming. Get in. The lightning's gonna strike anyway. Might as well be together when it does."

He hesitated, then shucked his shirt and slid into the water beside her. The storm raged outside, but in the water, in the quiet dark, something finally stirred between them — not dead anymore, not alive yet, but moving, like a current, like something that might become real if they stopped treading water long enough to find out.