Palm Fronds and Empty Pools

The **dog** — Martha's rescue, some anxious terrier mix — wouldn't stop shaking. Thunder, she said, though the sky was the color of old television static, that peculiar gray before a storm that refuses to break.

We sat on the concrete edge of her empty **pool**, Martha in her sundress that cost more than my car, me in the same jeans I'd worn to three funerals that year. She'd drained it last winter after the divorce, said she couldn't stand the way the water reflected too much of nothing.

"You look like **shit**," she said, not unkindly.

"I feel like a **zombie**," I admitted. "The walking dead kind. Not the pop culture ones. The Greek myth ones — dead souls who can't speak until they drink blood. Just drifting."

Martha pressed a cold gin and tonic into my hand. Her **palm**, when it brushed mine, was warm and alive. We'd known each other since we were twelve, since she'd punched Tyler Montgomery for making fun of my mother's accent. That's what friendship really was: not the shared history or the photographs, but the willingness to draw blood.

"Maybe you need to drink blood," she said, and we both laughed, but it was the kind of laughter that catches in your throat like fish bones.

The dog finally settled between us, three species of hurting thing pressed together on the edge of something that used to hold water. I thought about how we build these containers for ourselves — careers, marriages, identities — and then one day you wake up and they're just empty concrete shells reflecting a sky that never bothers to rain.

"Fill it," Martha said suddenly, reading my mind the way she always had. "The pool. Fill it back up."

"That's not the problem."

"Isn't it, though?"

The dog whined in his sleep. Palm fronds rattled overhead like dry bones. And I realized, with a clarity that felt almost like drowning, that Martha hadn't been asking about the pool at all.

So I did what any good friend would do. I cried. And she let me, and somewhere in the sound of it, the sky finally broke open.