Dead Things Don't Float

Elena sat at the edge of the apartment complex pool at 2 AM, her legs dangling in the chlorinated water. The iPhone face-up on the concrete beside her kept lighting up with work emails she'd never answer—she'd been laid off three days ago, but Slack still expected her presence. She felt like a zombie, going through motions that no longer meant anything.

Her phone buzzed again. Another rejection from a job application. She picked it up, thumb hovering over the screen, and saw the photo background—her and David at the lake last summer, before everything fell apart. Before she'd discovered he was still seeing his ex, before her department had been "restructured." She'd been bearing the weight of both betrayals alone, and it was crushing her.

Something moved at the bottom of the pool. A dark shape, barely visible in the underwater light. Elena leaned closer, her heart pounding. It couldn't be—her building was in the middle of the city, nowhere near wilderness.

The shape shifted again. A teddy bear. Some child's lost toy, waterlogged and slowly decomposing at the bottom of the pool. It bobbed toward the surface, one glass eye staring up at her like an accusation.

She'd had a bear like that once, given to her by her father before he left. She'd clung to it through every childhood trauma, every disappointment, every loss. And now here she was, thirty-five years old, sitting alone in the dark like some ghost haunting her own life.

Elena stripped off her clothes and slipped into the water. The cold shocked her awake. She dove toward the bottom, fingers closing around the sodden toy. When she broke the surface, gasping, the bear was clutched to her chest like something sacred.

Her iPhone lit up on the concrete. David's name flashed across the screen. He was probably drunk, probably lonely, probably wanting to pretend nothing had happened.

She let it ring. The bear floated beside her, a dead thing that refused to sink. Some losses were buoyant that way—they wouldn't go down no matter how much you tried to drown them. But you could still learn to swim.