Electric Dead

Marcus stood at the edge of the community pool, 3 AM, the water black as an unlit room. Forty-two years old and he'd become something that shambled through days without really living them—a husband who'd stopped touching his wife, a father who nodded at his son's baseball games while his mind stayed three states away. The word dissolved in his mouth before he could form it: zombie. Not the movie kind. The real kind. The men and women who'd loved and lost and forgotten how to do either properly.

He'd come here swimming every night since Elena left three weeks ago. The water was the only thing that could hold him without judgment.

His iPhone vibrated against the concrete—her again. She wanted to discuss the division of assets, as if twelve years could be split like a pie. He stared at the screen, lightning fractured the sky behind him, illuminating the water's surface like cracked glass. The storm had been threatening for hours, hanging low and pregnant over the suburbs.

The day she'd packed her bags, their son Leo had a baseball tournament. Marcus had watched from the bleachers, phone in hand, waiting for a text that never came. Every crack of the bat had sounded like a bone breaking. Every cheer from the crowd had felt mocking.

Now, lightning struck somewhere close. The thunder followed immediately, shaking his chest.

He remembered teaching Leo to hold a bat when he was six—"grip it like you're shaking hands with an old friend." That friend had turned out to be divorce. That friend had packed boxes while Marcus sat on the couch, feeling something vital being carved out of him.

The rain started, hard and sudden, whipping the pool into froth. Marcus didn't move. Let the lightning find him. Let the phone short-circuit. Let whatever was going to happen happen.

Instead, he dove.

The water was cold enough to shock. Swimming through the dark, through the rain, through the impossibility of his own life, Marcus surfaced gasping. He'd been dead for three weeks. Tonight, breathless and aching, he might finally start living again.