Drowning in the Shallows

The sky tore open, a jagged scar of lightning that illuminated everything I didn't want to see. Maggie's face, for one. She stood at the edge of the pool, clutching her wine glass like a weapon, and in that flash, I saw all the years we'd spent pretending not to hate each other.

"You're doing it again," she said. "That thing where you disappear while standing right next to me."

I kicked off my shoes and stepped into the water. It was colder than I expected, shocking in its refusal to be comfortable. "I'm not disappearing. I'm just... tired, Maggie."

"We're both tired." She peeled an orange, the spray of citrus hitting the air between us like tiny sparklers. "But some of us are too cowardly to admit what it means."

Barnaby—our dog, though really he was hers—waddled over and nosed my knee. His arthritis had gotten worse this spring, his movements stiff and careful, like he was teaching us something about dignity in decline. I scratched behind his ears and felt the sudden, absurd urge to cry.

"Remember when we put in this pool?" I asked. "We thought it would fix everything. We thought if we just built something permanent, something concrete, the rest would follow."

"And now it's just a place we avoid swimming." She dropped the orange peel into the water, where it floated like a abandoned life raft. "That's us, isn't it? All this infrastructure, no one using it."

Another lightning strike, closer this time. The thunder arrived on its heels, a cosmic gavel. Rain began to fall, flattening my shirt against my back, but neither of us moved toward shelter.

"I'm leaving," I said, and the rain made it easy to pretend the water on my face wasn't something else. "Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But soon."

Magenta nodded, once. She'd known before I did. "The dog stays with me."

"I know."

We stood in the rain as the storm swallowed the backyard, the pool, the future we'd outgrown years ago. Barnaby shook himself vigorously, spraying water and indifference everywhere. In that moment, I realized: some drownings happen in shallow water, and some storms break just when you need them to.