Electric Waters

The rooftop pool at the Mandalay was empty, which was exactly what Elena needed. She'd spent seven hours listening to men in suits who spoke in circles, their bullshit piling higher than the desert dunes visible through the floor-to-ceiling glass. The word pivoted through her head as she kicked off her heels and stepped to the edge. This whole conference had been one long exercise in swimming upstream against a current of corporate bull.

She dove in.

The water shocked her skin—too cold, almost biting. She swam hard, stroke after stroke, trying to outpace the email she'd received that morning: your position has been eliminated. Three years of七十-hour weeks, of sacrificing her marriage, of missing her sister's wedding, and this was the payoff. A severance package and a security escort.

Above her, the sky had turned that bruised purple that meant trouble. The first storm of the season.

A flash of lightning split the clouds, illuminating the empty pool deck with stark white clarity. For a second, she could see everything: the lounge chairs like abandoned corpses, the palm trees thrashing in the wind, her own arms cutting through the water, pale and purposeful.

She kept swimming. There was something liberating about it—like she was daring the universe to strike her down. What did she have to lose?

The air smelled of ozone and impending violence. Another lightning bolt cracked closer, shaking the glass beneath the water's surface. She should get out. The pool safety guidelines alone would be screaming at her: not during electrical storms.

But she remembered her father, thirty years ago, standing in their front yard as a tornado siren wailed. He'd pointed at the dark funnel and said, Sometimes you just stand there and let it come. You can't outrun everything, little bull.

He'd called her that since she was four—bull-headed, stubborn, relentless. She'd worn it like armor through business school, through promotions, through the brutal acquisition that had cost half her team their jobs.

Now she wondered if stubbornness was the same thing as strength.

The sky opened. Rain lashed down in sheets, flattening the pool surface, blurring the line between water and air. Elena tread water at the center of the pool, suspended in the space between depths, while lightning struck around her—some hits close enough that she could taste the electricity on her tongue.

She laughed. A sound that rose from her chest, raw and ugly and real. She was unemployed, almost thirty-nine, single, and treading water in a lightning storm.

Tomorrow she'd figure out what came next. Tomorrow she'd pack her things and fly home and maybe call her sister for the first time in six months.

Tonight, she let the rain strip her clean.