Drowning in Shallow Water

The papaya arrived perfectly cubed, glistening like some exotic apology I hadn't asked for. I stabbed a piece with my fork, watching the juice bleed onto the white tablecloth. It was too sweet—like the rest of this cursed week at the resort, everything tasted like trying too hard.

Below my balcony, three stories down, the pool glittered with the violence of a thousand tiny suns. I watched them swimming—languid, endless laps that reminded me of how I'd been moving through my marriage for years: repetitious, going nowhere, but never stopping. The woman in the blue swimsuit did backstroke, her face turned perpetually toward the sky, refusing to look at where she was going. Smart woman.

The bartender had asked if I wanted to join the baseball pool. "Twenty bucks, pick your team," he'd said, and I'd almost laughed. At ten years old, baseball had been my religion—the crack of the bat, the dirt infield, the way my father's voice rose when I connected with a pitch. Now it was just another way to lose money while pretending to care about something that didn't matter.

My phone buzzed. Sarah's lawyer again.

I pushed the papaya away. The fruit tasted like decay disguised as sweetness, like the last three years of my life—the expensive dinners, the strained conversations, the way we'd both pretended not to notice we were swimming toward different ends of the pool.

Below, the blue-suited woman climbed out of the water. She stood at the pool's edge, dripping, looking down at her reflection as if trying to remember who she was before the water took everything.

I ordered whiskey. The papaya sat there, mocking me with its perfect geometrical optimism, as if cutting things into neat little squares could ever make them manageable.