Dead Connection

The cable guy left three hours ago, taking with him the only thing that still held us together. I looked at the severed coaxial cable dangling from the wall like a dead snake, its copper guts exposed.

"He said we need a new line to the pole," I told Sarah, but she didn't look up from her phone. She'd stopped looking up from anything months ago.

Barnaby, our ancient golden retriever, wheezed from his bed. His back legs had stopped working last week, and the vet said it was time. We'd scheduled it for Friday, but neither of us could bring ourselves to say the words out loud.

We were the ones who were dead already. Not Barnaby.

I poured a drink and watched Sarah move through the living room, her automatic gestures terrifyingly precise. She wiped the same spot on the counter three times. She arranged the coasters in descending order of size. We'd become these office zombies, performing our marriage like a job we'd stopped caring about but couldn't quit.

"Remember when we used to watch movies?" I asked. "When the cable meant something?"

"I have that conference call at nine," she said.

Barnaby let out a soft whine, and something broke in my chest. I walked over and sank to the floor beside him, buried my face in his fur. He smelled like old carpets and unconditional love—the last real thing in this house of ghosts.

Sarah's phone chimed. She answered it in the other room, her professional voice sliding into place like a mask.

I lay there with my dog in the gathering dark, no TV flicker to fill the silence, and realized that sometimes the cable doesn't just break. Sometimes you cut it yourself, and then you pretend it never existed at all.