Frayed Connections

The coaxial cable lay severed on the living room carpet like a dead snake, its copper entrails exposed. Elena stared at it, the way she'd been staring at most things lately—without really seeing them.

"Are you listening?" Mark asked from the kitchen. His voice had that thin quality it got when he was trying not to sound angry.

"The cable's broken," she said.

"Your vitamin regimen is on the counter. You forgot to take them yesterday. And the day before."

Elena picked up her iPhone instead. Six missed calls from her mother. Two from work. One from Mark—earlier that afternoon, while she'd been sitting in her car in the grocery store parking lot, unable to make herself go inside. The phone felt like a small, smooth stone in her hand, heavy with all the messages she couldn't bring herself to answer.

"I'm not depressed," she'd told her doctor last week. "I'm just... efficient. I've eliminated the unnecessary parts."

The necessary parts were narrowing. Work emails. Mark's reminders about vitamins and bills and whether they'd talked to the landscaper. Her mother's voice cracking on the phone, asking if she was okay.

Mark came into the living room, looking at the cable, then at her. "I can splice it. We don't need to buy a new one."

"Why bother?" Elena heard herself say. "We barely watch TV anyway."

"That's not the point."

She looked up at him really looked, for the first time in weeks. The lines around his eyes had deepened. His shirt was untucked, something that used to bother her and now just seemed like another thing she'd stopped noticing.

"The cable can be fixed," he said quietly. "But you have to want it fixed."

Elena thought about the vitamins in their orange plastic bottle. About the phone that kept lighting up in her hand. About how easy it would be to just let everything go dark.

She set the phone on the coffee table. "Okay," she said. "Show me how to splice it."

Mark's shoulders dropped an inch. "I'll get the electrical tape."

The cable lay there, still broken. But for the first time in months, Elena thought maybe they could mend it together.