Dead Things Don't Float

Maya sank into the hotel pool at 2 AM, the water swallowing her like a second skin. The chlorine stung her eyes—appropriate, since she'd been crying since Richard's keynote speech ended three hours ago.

She'd sat in the front row, watching her husband of twelve years gesture at the projected charts with practiced enthusiasm. He'd been a zombie since the IPO. Sleepwalking through their life, through conversations, through touch. Empty eyes, hollowed out by the pursuit of something he couldn't name.

"You're being dramatic," he'd said afterward in the elevator. "It's just going to be a little longer at the office for a while. This is what we worked for."

Bullshit. The word had crystallized in her throat, sharp as glass.

Now she floated on her back, staring up at the glass atrium ceiling where constellations of recessed lights mocked the real stars they couldn't see. A zombie marriage—that's what her sister had called it last Thanksgiving. "Still walking around, Maya, but there's nobody home."

She thought about the conference room where Richard had taken the stage, that bull of a man—her bullish, stubborn, brilliant husband—preaching about disrupted markets and paradigms while their daughter waited at home with a sitter, again. The applause had been thunderous. Maya had clapped too, her hands moving automatically.

The water lapped against her ears, drowning out the hotel's ambient hum. She could pack now. Walk out with her hair still wet. The thought both terrified and electrified her—like jumping from a height she'd been standing on for years.

Instead she treaded water, suspended between the woman who'd fallen in love with Richard's laugh in a dive bar and the one who now floated alone in a rooftop pool at 2 AM, wondering when the dying had started and whether she was brave enough to make it stop.

The zombie beside her in bed every morning would wake soon. She had to decide if she would still be there.