Electricity in the Water

Julie hadn't been swimming since she was twelve, but as she lowered herself into Marcus's pool at midnight, the muscle memory returned. The water wrapped around her like a second skin, cool and demanding. She'd spent thirty years building her pyramid—career, mortgage, the perfect marriage to Peter, a man whose bullish certainty had once felt like safety but now felt like suffocation.

"You shouldn't be here," Marcus said from the deck, holding two beers. He was twenty-eight to her forty-seven, a contractor Peter had hired to renovate the basement.

"Lightning's supposed to hit soon," Julie said, treading water. "Isn't that when the air's most electric?"

Marcus's baseball cap sat beside him. He coached Little League. Peter used to play, back when they were dating. She'd loved watching him then, the way his body moved with such easy purpose. Now he only watched from the couch, growing softer and more resentful each year.

"Peter will kill me," Marcus said, but he set down the beers and slipped into the pool anyway.

The first lightning strike turned the whole backyard white. In that flash, Julie saw everything: the ladder she'd climbed rung by miserable rung, Peter sleeping beside her night after night without touching her, the work emails she answered at 11 PM while the world kept spinning without her.

"I'm leaving him," she said, and the words tasted like salt.

Marcus tread water beside her, young and terrified. "You don't mean that."

"I've been swimming in circles my whole life," she said, as another bolt cracked the sky. "I think it's time I learned to breathe."