Seven Seconds of Lightning

The coaxial cable lay coiled between them like a dead snake, a technological umbilical cord they'd finally cut. Sarah had insisted on cancelling the cable subscription after Marcus lost his job three months ago. Another austerity measure in a house drowning in them.

'You don't even watch TV anymore,' she'd said, and she wasn't wrong. Marcus spent his days staring at job postings on his laptop, his whiskey glass sweating rings onto the coffee table. He'd stopped watching anything that wasn't his own failures replaying in an endless loop.

Outside, lightning splintered the sky—a violent, beautiful fracture that illuminated the kitchen in stark relief. In that split second, Marcus saw everything: Sarah's silhouette at the sink, her shoulders curved in that defeated posture he'd memorized over twelve years of marriage. Their daughter's crayon drawings still fluttering on the refrigerator door. And on the counter, beside the half-empty wine bottle, the goldfish bowl.

'Bubbles' was dead, of course. Had been for a week. Neither of them had the heart to flush him, and neither had the energy to buy a replacement. So they'd left him there, floating near the surface, an orange sentinel to their shared inertia. Goldfish were supposed to have seven-second memories. Marcus wished he could say the same. Instead, he remembered everything: Sarah's laugh when they'd bought this house, the way she'd looked in her wedding dress, the moment he'd realized his promotion was actually a layoff in disguise.

Another flash of lightning. The thunder followed close behind, rattling the windows.

'Storm's getting worse,' Sarah said, not turning around.

Marcus nodded, realized she couldn't see him. 'Yeah.'

'The cable guy is supposed to come tomorrow,' she continued. 'To disconnect everything.'

'Right.'

She turned then, and in the kitchen's soft light, Marcus saw that she'd been crying. He hadn't noticed in months—or maybe he had, and just stopped reacting. That was the thing about drowning: eventually, you stopped fighting the water.

'Marcus,' she said, 'we can't keep doing this. Living like ghosts in our own life.'

'What do you want me to do?'

'Anything,' she said. 'Something. I don't care if we're broke. I care that we're disappearing.' She gestured vaguely around the kitchen, at the dead fish and the empty walls and the cable coiled on the floor like a promise they'd broken to each other. 'This isn't a marriage. It's just... waiting to die.'

Lightning struck somewhere nearby. The power flickered, then died. In the sudden darkness, Marcus heard her breathing in the kitchen. He thought about job postings and whiskey glasses and the terrifying prospect of starting over at forty-two. He thought about Bubbles, who'd lived for three years in a bowl, swimming the same small circles, and still—somehow—found the energy to keep going.

'Okay,' Marcus said into the darkness. 'Okay.' He didn't know what he was agreeing to, exactly. But it was the first thing he'd said in months that felt like a beginning instead of an end.