Static Electricity

The tropical resort brochure had promised paradise, but Maria was spending her tenth anniversary staring at a drained swimming pool while her husband checked emails three time zones away.

The pool's concrete basin was cracked, a jagged lightning bolt of damage running through the blue tiles. Empty, just like the promise of this trip. Maria sat on the edge, her bare feet dangling into the shallow end where a stray dog — a mangy golden retriever with one ear that didn't stand up — had made its bed on a pile of dried palm fronds.

"You're not supposed to be here either," she told the dog, who thumped its tail without opening its eyes.

She'd come outside to escape the air conditioning and the silence of the suite. The air between her and David had become something you could cut with a knife, thick with everything they weren't saying. He'd stopped touching her somewhere around year seven, his hands always occupied with phones or tablets or the invisible weight of carrying them.

"Maria?"

She turned. A man stood near the pool gate — maybe thirty, with dark hair curling at his collar and eyes that suggested he understood things he shouldn't. He held two drinks.

"I'm Ethan," he said. "I work at the front desk. You looked like you could use this."

He set a coconut on the concrete beside her. Maria realized she must look as wrecked as she felt.

"Anniversary?" Ethan asked, sitting on the opposite side of the pool basin.

"Is it that obvious?"

He shrugged. "I've got a talent for reading people. My mother was a palm reader."

Maria laughed, a dry, rusty sound. "Mine was an accountant. Numbers don't lie, people do."

"So what's the number?" Ethan asked quietly. "How many more nights?"

"Two. Then we go home and pretend everything's fine."

The dog lifted its head, sensing something in the air — a change in pressure, the way animals do before storms. Maria felt it too. Not weather, but possibility. Lightning, real and metaphorical, illuminating everything she'd been avoiding.

"My wife left me six months ago," Ethan said. "Right before I was going to propose. I thought I knew everything about her, and then I didn't know her at all."

Maria's chest tightened. She reached for the coconut, her fingers brushing Ethan's. A spark — actual static electricity, or maybe something else.

"This is ridiculous," she said. "I'm a married woman. You're a stranger."

"I'm also the only person who's asked you how you are in two days."

She stood up, her heart hammering. The dog watched her, wise and still. Beyond the resort fence, real lightning cracked open the sky, sudden and violent.

"I have to go," Maria said, but she didn't move.

"You don't," Ethan replied. "You could stay right here. In the moment. Before everything gets complicated again."

Maria looked back at the hotel suite, then at the stranger with kind eyes and a broken heart, then at the empty pool that would never hold water again. Sometimes drowning wasn't about water at all.

She sat back down.