Static in the Water
The pool had been drained for weeks, leaving behind a crater of cracked blue concrete that collected rainwater and regret. Margot sat on the plastic lounge chair, her lover's fedora resting beside her like a dark omen. Richard should have arrived two hours ago.
"Should have" being the operative phrase.
Her hair — meticulously highlighted, expensive, the color of sun-ripened wheat — was already frizzing in the humidity. She'd spent two hours and three hundred dollars on it yesterday, preparing for this weekend getaway that now felt like a punchline. Richard loved her hair. He said it reminded him of his first wife, before the cancer. That should have been warning enough.
Lightning forked across the sky, violet and vicious, illuminating the empty pool with the clinical clarity of an X-ray. For a moment, in that stark light, the rainwater in the pool's bottom looked like spilled mercury.
Her phone buzzed. Richard's wife. Not a typo. His actual wife.
Margot had never met the woman. Didn't need to. She knew her through the things Richard said, the way he sometimes called Margot by the wrong name in the dark particularity of motel rooms. The wife was a landscape architect. She designed pools like this one — beautiful, useless things people couldn't afford to fill.
She picked up the hat. Inside the sweatband, she found what she'd come for: the business card Richard had dropped last week, the one with the lipstick stain that wasn't her shade. Not his wife's either.
Another lightning strike. This one close enough that she felt it in her teeth.
The pool below her suddenly seemed alive, the rainwater rippling with energy she hadn't noticed before. She realized with a jolt what she was seeing: the storm was feeding into the pool's old electrical system, making the water dance with current. Beautiful and deadly, like everything else she'd touched lately.
She stood, leaving the hat on the chair, and walked to her car. Her hair was ruined. Her heart was quiet. For the first time in three years, she felt clean.