Screen Life at the Empty Pool

The motel pool sat drained and cracked, a concrete wound beneath the Nevada moon. Mara sat on its edge, iphone ghost-screen illuminating her face in the darkness. Three weeks since David left. Three weeks of checking messages that never came.

A stray cat—scrawny, one-eared—emerged from the shadows, rubbing against her ankle like it had known her forever. She'd started feeding it yesterday, the first living thing she'd touched since he walked out. It purred, a tiny motor against her silence.

Her thumb hovered over his name in her contacts. The last text sat there, unread: "I'm sorry. I can't do this anymore." What did that even mean? The apologies had dried up along with her tears.

She remembered how they'd met—his hungry hazel eyes across that crowded bar in Chicago, how he'd called her a "fox" with a smile that promised everything and delivered nothing. Two years of dinners, deadlines, lazy Sundays. He knew her coffee order, her hatred of crossword puzzles, the way she slept with one foot outside the covers. Now he knew someone else's.

The cat meowed, demanding attention. Mara dropped the phone—screen-first, a final fuck you—and buried her fingers in the animal's dirty fur. It didn't judge her for drinking cheap wine from a plastic cup. It didn't know about the miscarriage she'd never told him about, the one that sent her running to this no-name town with its drained pools and silent rooms.

"We're both just strays now," she whispered. The cat butted its head against her palm.

Her iphone buzzed once—a text from her mother. "Honey, please call me." She stared at it until the screen went dark, then tossed it onto the pool's concrete bottom. It landed with a hollow clatter, another artifact in the graveyard of her old life.

Mara lay back on the pool's cracked surface, staring up at stars she'd never noticed in Chicago. The cat curled into her side, both of them breathing in the desert night, alive in the wreckage.