Surface Tension

The divorce papers sat on the kitchen counter next to a wilting bag of spinach Marcos had bought three days ago, when they still believed in meal prep and five-year plans. Elena stood at the sliding glass door, watching him in the pool.

Marcos was swimming laps with the furious precision of a man outrunning something. Breaststroke, flip turn, breaststroke. He'd been out there for an hour since their argument about the padel tournament they'd signed up for last summer—the summer before everything curdled, before the miscarriage that neither of them knew how to talk about.

"You going to sign them?" she'd asked, and he'd walked out the back door without answering.

Now his fingers were pruning. She could see them through the glass, clawing at the water.

Elena opened the fridge. The spinach had gone slimy at the edges, the way good intentions do when you leave them in the dark too long. She remembered Marcos making her salads during those first weeks of trying, when they were certain that proper nutrition would buy them what they wanted. He'd chopped the spinach so fine, laughing that he was massaging her uterus with vitamins.

She dumped the bag into the trash can beneath the sink. The sound of hitting bottom carried.

Marcos had stopped swimming. He was floating on his back, staring up at something she couldn't see. The sky, probably. Or maybe nothing at all.

They'd played padel every Sunday morning for six months. The way he looked at her across the net when she nailed a serve—that was the last time she'd felt truly seen by him. Lately, he looked through her, like she was made of glass and he was already on the other side.

Elena walked outside. The concrete was cold under her bare feet.

"I'm going to my mother's," she said. "Just for the weekend."

Marcos treaded water, blinking droplets from his eyelashes. "Okay."

"The padel tournament is next weekend."

"I know."

"We can't play."

"I know," he said again.

She waited for him to ask when she'd be back, or what would happen after. But he only watched her, and in his eyes she saw something that looked like relief, and that was somehow worse than anger. They'd both been drowning for months, and only one of them had been trying to swim.

"Take the spinach out when you get out," she said. "It's gone bad."

"Okay," he said.

She went inside and closed the sliding door. Behind her, Marcos began swimming again, slicing through water that held him up even as it tried to pull him under.