Dead Things Float

Maya found Elena's cat floating in the pool at dawn. The orange tabby had been nineteen, arthritic and shadows-loving, but death had transformed it into something almost beautiful—fur fanned like coral around a stillness that felt almost holy.

She considered fishing it out, but the pool belonged to the house she no longer recognized. The marriage she'd inhabited for seven years had become a series of performed gestures, both of them moving through rooms like zombies in a disaster that had already happened. David would leave at 7:02 AM. She would microwave coffee. They would ask about each other's days without listening to the answers.

The goldfish bowl on her nightstand had become a metaphor she couldn't escape. She'd bought them on impulse three years ago—two comet fish with Streaming orange-and-white tails. They'd lived in their tiny universe, circling the same infinite loop, forgetting what they saw three seconds later. She'd started feeding them less, just to see if they'd notice the pattern breaking.

They hadn't.

Elena called the cat's death "a mercy." They drank wine on the patio where Maya had confessed—two months ago, one desperate evening after the office holiday party—that she'd been sleeping with someone else. Not a friend, but almost. Someone who made her feel remembered.

"You're not a bad person," Elena had said. "You're just water-starved in a desert."

Now Maya stood at the pool's edge, staring at the dead cat, at her own fractured reflection distorted by ripples. David's BMW would pull into the driveway in twelve minutes. He would ask if she wanted dinner. She would say yes, and they would eat in the kind of silence that feels like drowning.

The goldfish died last week. She'd flushed them without ceremony.

Her phone buzzed. The almost-friend. *Coffee?*

Maya looked at the cat one last time, then at the house where everything looked exactly like a home should. She realized she was already dead in the way that mattered—just hadn't been buried yet.

She texted back. *Yes.*