Dead Man Swimming

The email arrived at 4:47 PM—just late enough to ruin Elena's evening, just early enough that she couldn't pretend she hadn't seen it. Personnel Reduction Optimization. Subject line buzzwords that meant one thing: her department was the zombie project that finally needed putting down.

She drove home in the gray slush of November, windshield wipers fighting a losing battle against the drizzle. Her apartment greeted her with the same hollow silence it always did—just her and the cable TV glowing blue in the corner, her sole companion through three years of corporate decay. She'd been sleepwalking through these months, a functioning corpse showing up at 9 AM, leaving at 6 PM, her soul slowly evaporating in fluorescent-lit meeting rooms where they discussed synergy and right-sizing and all the other euphemisms for gradual extinction.

The apartment complex pool sat below her balcony, its surface still and black as onyx. Elena had never swum in it. Had never even touched the water. But she liked watching it from above, liked the way the pool lights turned it an impossible turquoise at night, like something from a dream she couldn't quite remember.

She opened another bottle of wine—her third this week—and stepped onto the balcony. The November cold bit through her cardigan. Below, the pool's underwater lights flickered on, triggered by some timer she'd never noticed before. The water transformed, glowing with that impossible blue, and something in her chest cracked open.

She thought about the version of herself who'd moved here three years ago, ambitious and terrified and ready to build something real. That woman had dissolved somewhere, replaced by this zombie in expensive heels, this creature who'd forgotten how to want anything beyond survival.

The wine bottle sat half-empty on the patio table. The cable TV droned inside, some reality show about people whose problems were simple enough to solve in forty-two minutes. Below, the water waited—still and black and impossibly deep.

Elena stood at the railing. She could go inside, pour the rest of the wine, let herself dissolve further into the furniture. Or she could go downstairs. Could strip off these dead woman's clothes and slip into something that wasn't this—not the job, not the apartment, not this half-life she'd been living.

The water whispered up at her. She set down the wine. She went to the elevator.