Signal Loss

The corporate floor stretched before Elena like a graveyard of ambition, her colleagues nothing but zombie figures shuffling between meetings, eyes glazed with the hollow certainty of mortgages and deferred dreams. She sat at her desk, fifty-one years old and suddenly incapable of pretending this mattered anymore.

'You okay?' Marcus asked, leaning against her cubicle wall. He was twenty-eight, still possessed of that dangerous optimism that made everything harder.

'The cable,' she said, gesturing at the tangle of black cords behind her monitor. 'It's all held together by this one fraying cable, Marcus. The whole operation.'

He laughed, misunderstanding everything. 'IT will fix it.'

Lightning split the sky outside, illuminating the rain that had been falling for three days straight. Elena's phone buzzed—David, again. Their marriage had become a series of unreturned calls and resentful silences, both of them waiting for the other to acknowledge what they'd lost. She thought of the backyard pool they'd installed together five years ago, now green with neglect, a monument to optimism they'd stopped funding.

She stood up. 'I'm going home.'

'But the presentation—'

Fuck the presentation. The words formed in her throat but didn't escape.

The drive home took thirty minutes through sheets of rain that turned the highway into a conspiracy of tail lights and skidding tires. When she walked through the door, Buster—their golden retriever, the only living thing that still greeted her with unambiguous joy—bounded toward her, his tail thudding against the wall. David was in the kitchen, hands braced on the counter, watching lightning crack the sky through the sliding glass doors.

'I was going to leave you,' he said, not turning around.

Elena felt something inside her rearrange—a painful click, like a joint finally snapping back into place. 'I know. I was going to leave me too.'

He turned, and she saw the exhaustion etched into his face, mirror to her own. 'The pool guy came today. Said we need to decide whether to drain it or fix it.'

'That's not really about the pool, is it?'

'No.' He crossed the room, stopped just shy of touching her. 'I keep thinking about that trip we never took. Costa Rica. Before the promotions, before we started living like—'

'Like zombies,' she finished.

The dog whined, pressing against both of them, and Elena realized she was crying. Lightning illuminated the kitchen, casting their shadows against the refrigerator—two ghost figures caught in the flash between endings and beginnings.

'Drain it,' she said. 'The pool. Let it go.'

David's hand found hers. 'And then what?'

'Then we figure out what happens when we finally wake up.'