Electric at the Bear's Pool
The motel pool was empty, the water still and black as onyx. Sarah sat on the edge, legs dangling in, the chlorinated cold shocking her bare skin. She'd come here to think, to decide whether to return to Chicago or keep driving west.
She'd told Michael she was visiting her sister. Instead, she'd checked into a roadside motel with a flickering neon sign: THE BEAR'S DEN. A massive stuffed grizzly stood in the lobby, glass eyes watching her check in, its fur matted with decades of travelers' dust.
A storm was brewing. Sarah could taste ozone on her tongue, feel the pressure dropping in her joints. She'd always been able to predict rain, a weird barometric sensitivity Michael had found charming at first, then annoying, then nothing at all. That was the problem, really — not the lack of passion or the years of unsaid things, but the slow erosion into nothing.
The first flash of lightning turned the pool surface silver. She counted. One thousand one, one thousand two — thunder rattled the deck chair beside her. A storm warning, or a sign?
She'd met someone. David, from the art gallery. He'd looked at her paintings — those abstract watercolors she kept in the closet — and actually seen them. Had seen her. They'd kissed once, chaste and terrifying, behind the gallery after hours. She hadn't told Michael. hadn't needed to; the distance between them had become absolute.
Another lightning strike, closer this time. The hair on her arms rose. The bear in the lobby flashed through her mind — how ridiculous it looked, how tragic, preserved in that permanent glass-eyed stare. Was that her? Stuck posed in a life she'd outgrown?
Her phone buzzed on the towel. Michael. Or David. She didn't look.
The storm broke. Rain sheeted down, and she slid into the pool fully clothed. The water was shockingly cold, shocking her lungs, shocking everything. She surfaced gasping, laughing, crying. Lightning struck somewhere nearby, the crack instant and blindingly bright.
In that flash of white, she saw everything clearly: Michael sleeping beside her for ten years, David's hands on her waist, the road ahead, the road behind. All of it illuminated in an electric moment, choice stripped bare.
She climbed out dripping, grabbed her phone, and walked toward the lobby. The bear watched her pass. Outside, the world had changed.
She got in her car and drove west.