Signal Lost

The cable snapped somewhere in the third hour of the storm, plunging Mara's apartment into darkness. She'd been watching some reality show she hated—just background noise to drown out the silence that had settled between her and Daniel like heavy furniture nobody wanted to move.

Now the only light came from the lightning that fractured the sky, illuminating Daniel's silhouette on the balcony. He was out there smoking, again. She watched through the glass doors, the rain sheeting down like a vertical ocean. Water had always been their element—met in a swimming pool, honeymooned in Maldives, fought in the shower of their first apartment. Now it felt like something drowning them both.

She pressed her forehead against the cold glass. He didn't turn around.

They'd become zombies, she realized. Not the movie kind—just two people moving through the motions of a marriage that had died years ago. Eat, work, sleep, repeat. They'd stopped asking questions. Stopped touching. Stopped seeing each other.

Another flash of lightning, closer this time. The thunder that followed shook the floor beneath her feet.

She remembered when they'd talk for hours in the dark, their voices low and urgent, like they were afraid the world might end before they finished saying everything. Now silence stretched between them like an ocean she didn't know how to cross anymore.

Daniel turned then, and for a moment, suspended in that blue-white flash, she saw him really saw him. The exhaustion etched around his eyes. The way his shoulders slumped. The cigarette burning down between his fingers.

He looked like a man who'd forgotten how to be happy.

He looked exactly like her.

Mara slid the door open. The rain immediately soaked her shirt, cold against her skin. She stepped onto the balcony, the wind whipping her hair across her face.

"The cable's out," she said.

Daniel looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time in months. He flicked the cigarette over the railing, watching it spiral down into the darkness.

"Yeah," he said. "I know."

"I don't want to be a zombie anymore," she said, and the words came out sharper than she intended, like she'd been sharpening them for years.

The lightning struck again, closer, and in that brief illumination, she saw something break behind his eyes.

"Me neither," he said.

The rain kept falling, washing over them both, and for the first time in a long time, neither of them moved away from it.