Deep End Blues

The baseball game droned on the cable TV mounted above the patio, but nobody was watching. Mark stood at the edge of the pool, gin and tonic sweating against his palm, watching his boss's wife laugh with her head thrown back. There was spinach between her front teeth—a dark, stubborn wedge that had survived three cocktails and no one had the courage to mention.

'You coming in?' called Jessica from the water, splashing water onto his shoes. She was the new marketing director, thirty-two and ruthless in ways Mark found exhausting.

'Don't swim,' he said, loosening his tie.

She laughed, treading water. 'Who doesn't swim?'

People who grow up in apartments with no access to water, he thought. People whose fathers worked three jobs and died at fifty-two from stress-related heart attacks. 'Just never learned,' he said instead.

The pool lights flickered on as dusk settled. Blue ripples transformed the water into something living, breathing. Mark felt the old familiar tug—the desire to simply let go, to sink beneath the surface and let the water take him. Not to die, necessarily, but to finally stop holding everything up.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. Probably Sarah asking about dinner, or more likely, asking about the cable bill he'd forgotten to pay again. Their marriage had become a series of unpaid bills and unsaid words, a slow erosion neither knew how to stop.

'Mark!' His boss clapped him on the back, breath smelling of expensive scotch. 'You're missing the game! Bottom of the ninth!'

On screen, a batter connected with the ball. The crowd roared. Somewhere, a life was changing.

Mark looked at the water again. The spinach was still there. He could mention it now—perform the social ritual of saving her from humiliation—or he could finish his drink and go home to unpaid bills and a wife who might or might not still love him.

'Actually,' Mark said, setting his glass on a coaster. 'I think I will.'

He pulled off his tie, then his watch. The water was cold when he jumped—shocking, violent, alive.