Static in the Deep

The coaxial cable lay coiled like a dead snake beside her desk, its silver entrails exposed where the connector had snapped. Mara stared at it, remembering how Richard had installed it three years ago, his fingers deft and certain as he spliced the wires, promising her reliable internet for their new work-from-home reality. Now Richard was gone—downsized during the third round of layoffs this year—and the cable was just another broken thing in an apartment full of them.

She'd been running from the truth for months: the company was sinking, and she was treading water in the open ocean without a life raft. Every morning she woke at 5 AM, her heart already racing, the bathroom mirror showing eyes that looked increasingly like a stranger's. Running the department now meant running on fumes, pretending the quarterly targets were achievable when everyone knew they were fiction.

Her phone buzzed—a message from the group chat where her former coworkers traded rumors about who'd bear the brunt of the next restructuring. She thought about Richard, how he'd borne the humiliation of being escorted out by security with his cardboard box, his chin held high despite the sheen in his eyes. He'd told her later, over too many drinks, that he'd rather be free than keep pretending the ship wasn't going down.

Tomorrow was her forty-second birthday. She'd booked the day off, told no one where she was going. Just a drive to the coast, to the old beach house her parents had rented every August when she was young, before the divorce, before the money problems, before everything got complicated.

Mara stood up, left the broken cable where it lay. Tomorrow she'd be swimming in the ocean again for the first time in twenty years. She remembered the salt water stinging her eyes, the way her mother laughed as she dove beneath the waves, how for a few seconds she could hold her breath and disappear into the quiet blue dark, weightless and unknown. Tomorrow she'd go back to that water, she'd go under and stay under until her lungs burned, and maybe then she'd finally remember how to breathe again.