Electric Silence

Elena swam laps in the university pool at 2 AM, the water smooth as black glass. Her arms cut through the silence, each stroke a question she couldn't voice aloud. Mark's hair had started falling out in clumps three weeks ago—chemotherapy, they said. The cancer had returned like an unwanted relative, settling into their marriage with quiet insistence.

That evening, lightning fractured the sky as they drove home from the oncologist. The flash illuminated Mark's profile, his once-vibrant curls now replaced by a scalp that looked too vulnerable, too young to be dying. He'd stopped shaving his head completely last week. 'Let it go,' he'd said, but Elena had found the hair clumps in their shower drain, gathering them like evidence of a crime.

'What are we supposed to do?' she'd asked earlier that day, pressing the doctor for options he couldn't give. The question hung between them like a sphinx's riddle—ancient, impossible, demanding an answer that didn't exist.

Now in the pool, Elena's muscles burned. She thought of Mark's body wasting away while hers remained stubbornly, uselessly whole. She thought of the lightning that had struck their life together—random, brutal, illuminating everything without offering warmth.

Her fingers brushed the pool's edge. She could keep swimming until dawn, could keep moving through water that held her up when nothing else did. But the sphinx remained, and Mark was asleep in their bed, and some questions have no answers, only the electric silence between one breath and the next.