Electric Current

The pool was empty at 11 PM, which was exactly what Elena needed. Twenty-six years old and already feeling like she'd been hollowed out, she swam laps as if trying to outpace the dead weight of her days. The water should have been peaceful, but instead it felt like amniotic fluid—warm, suffocating, holding her in a state of suspended animation while her life happened without her.

"You're becoming a zombie," David had told her two nights ago, his voice cracking with that terrible mixture of frustration and tendleness that means someone still gives a damn. "You come home and you're just... gone. Your body's there but nothing else is."

She'd wanted to slap him. Instead she'd cried, which was worse—weak, humiliating proof he was right.

Now, as she pulled herself through the water, her arms burning, the storm outside intensified. Thunder rattled the glass enclosure. Then lightning struck nearby—CRACK—and the whole pool complex went dark.

Elena stopped swimming, treading water in the sudden blackness. Her heart hammered. She'd been swimming for months, years, barely seeing the water, barely feeling anything at all. Now, stripped of vision, she could feel every current, every ripple, the exact temperature against her skin. The water pressed against her from all sides, holding her up.

Something in her chest cracked open.

She'd been moving through her life the way she swam laps: head down, blind to everything except the next stroke, the next breath, the next paycheck. All while David was trying to reach her, trying to connect, and she was just... gone. Present but absent. Alive but not living.

The emergency lights flickered on, casting everything in eerie red glow. Elena swam to the ladder, pulled herself out, and sat on the wet edge, shivering. She thought about David waiting at home, probably awake, probably worried. About the job that drained her dry. About how she'd become a stranger to herself.

Outside, the rain lashed against the glass. She stood up, grabbed her towel, and didn't bother with her phone. She just started walking toward the exit, toward home, toward whatever came next. The zombie could stay in the water. Elena had finally come up for air.