Signal Loss

Mara found the gray hair three weeks after David stopped looking at her.

She'd been pulling the coaxial cable from the wall, her fingers stiff with cold, when she caught her reflection in the darkened television screen. There it was—a single silver wire among the copper, running from her temple like a crack in porcelain. She was thirty-four.

"Your appointment's at four," David said from the couch, eyes fixed on his phone. He hadn't looked up when she came in. He hadn't asked about her day since October.

The cable guy arrived twenty minutes late. A burly man with kind eyes and dirt under his fingernails. He worked with practiced efficiency, stripping wires, testing signals, replacing the box that had mysteriously died overnight.

"Bad connection," he said, kneeling beside her. "Sometimes these things just... lose the signal. Can't find each other anymore."

Mara watched his hands move, deft and sure. She thought about David's hands, how they used to tangle in her hair when they made love, how they'd rest against the small of her back while they waited for coffee. Now they only held the phone. Scrolling, always scrolling.

"You okay, ma'am?" the cable guy asked.

She realized she'd been staring at his wedding ring. A simple gold band, worn smooth.

"Fine," she said. "Just tired."

David had become something else entirely—not dead, but not alive either. A creature of routine and screens and monosyllabic responses. He moved through their apartment like a ghost haunting its own life. She'd started sleeping in the guest room three weeks ago. He hadn't mentioned it.

The cable guy packed up his tools. "All set. You should have 500 megs now. Fast enough for anything."

"Thank you," she said, and meant it.

That night, she lay in the spare bed, listening to David move through the kitchen. The refrigerator opening and closing. The microwave beeping. The familiar sounds of a life they'd built together, now hollowed out from the inside.

She thought about the cable guy's words. About signals lost. About how you could be right next to someone, sleeping in the same bed for eight years, and still not reach them.

She found him on the couch, blue light washing over his face. She sat beside him, close enough that their thighs touched.

"David."

He didn't look up.

She reached out, her fingers finding the soft spot behind his ear, threading through his hair. He'd stopped getting it cut. It curled over his collar now, unkempt, unfamiliar.

"I found a gray hair today," she said.

His thumb paused over the screen. He turned to her, and for the first time in months, she saw something human in his eyes. Something afraid.

"We're getting old," he said, and his voice cracked.

"We're already old," she said. "If we keep living like this."

He set down the phone. His hand found hers, their fingers tangling together like cables finally finding their connection. The television hummed between them, filling the silence with stories that weren't theirs.

"I don't want to be a zombie," he whispered.

"Then come back to life," she said. "Please."

He leaned into her touch, his face pressing against her palm, and she felt it—that first faint signal, struggling through the static, reaching for home.