Goldfish in the Deep End

The chlorine made her eyes burn, or maybe that was just the crying she'd been doing in the shower earlier. Elena surfaced from the pool, gasping, her sodden **hair** plastered to her skull like a second, heavier skin. Forty-two years old and learning to swim again, because Richard had always said she was too afraid of everything.

"You're improving," called the instructor, a college girl named Riley who had probably never had her heart broken. Riley had that optimistic bounce to her ponytail, that unearned confidence of youth.

Elena tread water in the deep end, watching through the distorted lens of her goggles as a lone **goldfish**—likely someone's abandoned pet—navigated the chlorinated water near the surface. How was it still alive? How long could something survive on shock and instinct before it simply gave up?

From the pool deck came the crack of a bat from the television at the tiki bar. A **baseball** game, Richard's sport. He'd played in a recreational league until the divorce, using Sunday games as an excuse to avoid discussing their dead marriage. Now Sunday evenings were hers, filled with swimming lessons and margaritas for one.

She ordered lunch when she finally dragged herself from the water: a salad with grilled shrimp and sliced **papaya**, tropical and foreign and aggressively vibrant. The papaya tasted like loss, somehow sweet and rotten at the same time. She forced herself to eat it.

"First time here?" asked the bartender, a man with kind eyes and a wedding ring.

"No," Elena said. "My ex-husband loved this place. We came every anniversary. Seven years."

"Oh." His face fell with that specific awkwardness people reserved for divorce. "Well, you've got good form."

"I'm terrified," she confessed, surprising herself. "Every time I put my face in the water, I think I'll never come up."

"Then don't put your face under," he said. "Just swim. That's the thing about swimming—you decide how deep to go."

The goldfish had disappeared. Elena watched the ripples expand across the pool's surface, each one reaching outward until they dissolved into nothing. She ordered another drink and walked back to the deep end, ready to try again.