Submerged Frequencies

The motel pool glowed with that sickly artificial blue, the kind that made you think of radiation or things that shouldn't exist in nature. Mara sat on the edge, her legs dangling in water that felt too warm, too chemical, like something you shouldn't trust.

She'd left Tom three hours ago. Three hours, twelve minutes, and however many seconds it took for a marriage to dissolve into a cardboard box and a set of car keys.

"You're always somewhere else," he'd said, and the worst part was that he wasn't wrong. She was always somewhere else—in her head, in imaginary conversations, in scenarios she'd script and re-script like she was trying to get the dialogue perfect.

Her hair floated around her face in the humid air, escaping the messy bun she'd shoved it into sometime around dawn. She hadn't even packed a brush. Just grabbed clothes and credit cards and her mother's old jewelry box, the one with the broken latch.

Above her, the cable snaked across the pool house wall—thick black umbilical, split and spliced so many times it looked like it had been repaired with desperation and electrical tape. Every room in this place had a television. That's what the brochure promised: FREE CABLE, HBO, ALL THE CHANNELS YOUR HEART DESIRES.

Like that was something anyone's heart had ever desired.

She thought about her apartment, about the cable package she and Tom had argued over—the premium one with all the movie channels, because he said they deserved it, they worked hard, they should have nice things. They'd sit on opposite ends of the couch, watching movies they'd halfway ignore, phones glowing in their hands like personal fires.

"We're paying for connection," she'd said once, half-joking, and he'd looked at her like she'd said something fundamentally ungrateful.

Now she slipped into the water fully, let herself sink until her hair fanned out around her like dark smoke. The silence pressed in, heavy and absolute. For a moment she couldn't breathe, didn't want to, and then she broke the surface gasping, heart hammering, alive with something like fear and something like relief.

Above, through the water-distorted sky, the first stars appeared. They'd always been there, of course. She just hadn't bothered to look.