Lightning Over Water

Elena sat alone at the hotel bar in Belize, nursing a gin and tonic while watching the storm roll in across the Caribbean. She'd come here to decide—about the marriage, about the promotion that would take her to London, about whether the life she'd built was actually one she wanted.

The bartender, a weathered man with Mayan features, placed a sliced papaya in front of her. "On the house," he said. "Something sweet before the bitterness comes."

She tasted the papaya—musky, tropical, like sin and summer all at once. It reminded her of their honeymoon in Kauai, how Richard had laughed when she'd spit out the seeds like bullets, how they'd made love on the beach while lightning forked across the Pacific horizon, electric and terrifying and beautiful.

That had been six years ago. Now Richard sent texts about mortgage refinancing and asked if she'd picked up the dry cleaning. The lightning between them had long since grounded itself.

Rain began to sheet against the windows, blurring the ocean into gray nothing. A woman at the next table wept into her phone, something about not wanting to be alone. Elena felt for her—really felt for her—in a way she hadn't allowed herself to feel anything in months.

Her phone buzzed. Richard: "Thought you were checking in yesterday? Everything okay?"

She watched the water condensation slide down her glass, forming tears on the mahogany. The papaya flesh lay exposed, oxidizing in the humid air, turning from sunset gold to wounded pink. Everything rotted eventually. That was the truth she'd been avoiding.

"You okay?" the bartender asked.

Elena looked up. Lightning flashed, sudden and blinding, illuminating the bar in stark black and white. In that frozen moment, she saw everything—what she'd gained, what she'd lost, what she'd allowed herself to become.

"I'm fine," she said, surprising herself by meaning it. "Just figuring out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life."

Outside, thunder cracked like the world breaking open. Elena finished the papaya, swallowed the last of her drink, and picked up her phone to call Richard. Some storms you had to walk straight through. Others you simply watched from a distance, learning from the lightning without getting burned.