Surface Tension

The antidepressants sat next to his coffee mug—a **vitamin** for a soul that refused to be nourished. Marcus stared at them, the orange prescription bottle catching fluorescent light. Three years of this ritual. Three years of swallowing chemicals and hoping tomorrow would feel different.

His daughter's **goldfish** swam in its bowl on the corner of his desk, oblivious to the economic collapse of their lives. She'd won it at a carnival last summer, back when Elena still believed in happy endings. The fish had outlasted their marriage. There was something poetic about that, or maybe just cruel.

Outside, **water** pounded against the office window—another spring storm, another day of gray. Marcus had always loved rain. Now it just made him think of drowning, of how easily things could be washed away. Careers, marriages, the carefully constructed narrative of who he was supposed to be.

His **hat** lay on the coat rack by the door, a felt fedora he'd bought on impulse during that weekend trip to Chicago. Elena had laughed at him. "You're not Humphrey Bogart," she'd said, but she'd helped him adjust the brim anyway, her fingers lingering on his collar. That was before everything got hard. Before the silence between them grew louder than any argument.

The fish broke the surface, its mouth opening and closing in silent desperation. Marcus pressed his forehead against the cold glass. He was thirty-eight years old, successful by every metric that supposedly mattered, and he'd never felt more hollow. The vitamin D deficiency his doctor had discovered last month felt like a metaphor for everything missing from his life.

He reached for the phone. Not to call Elena—some doors, once closed, stayed closed—but his daughter. She was staying with his sister this weekend. She would be surprised to hear from him. He would ask about the fish. He would ask about school. He would try to remember how to be the person she still believed he was.

Outside, the rain kept falling, but inside, Marcus finally picked up the receiver.