Swimming Through the Static

The conference room air conditioning hummed at a frequency that made Elena's teeth ache. Around the table, her colleagues nodded like those toys with weighted bottoms—perpetually returning to an upright position of agreement. Elena twisted a strand of her hair around her finger, watching it turn from brown to gray and back again in the fluorescent lights. She'd stopped dyeing it six months ago, when she stopped caring what they thought.

"Zombie projects," her manager was saying. "We need to either reanimate them or bury them. Elena, your thoughts?"

She met his eyes—brown, lifeless, like something that had been washed ashore. "I think we've been walking dead for a while now."

The silence stretched until someone coughed.

After work, Elena drove to the reservoir. She'd been swimming every evening for three weeks, pushing through water that grew colder and darker as autumn settled in. Tonight, the moon hung low and full, painting the surface silver. She stripped down to her swimsuit and waded in, the shock of cold stealing her breath.

Something rustled in the cattails. A fox—sleek and red as a fresh wound—emerged, watching her with curious eyes. It didn't run. It sat on its haunches, tilting its head as she began her laps, back and forth, counting strokes to keep from thinking.

On her third turn, she stopped, treading water. The fox was still there. She thought of Tom, asleep in their bed, or maybe already gone. He'd been threatening to leave since July. His voice mail on her phone from earlier: "We need to talk."

She swam to shore and collapsed onto the sand, gasping. The fox approached cautiously, sniffing her outstretched palm. Its fur was coarse and warm against her skin. In that contact, something cracked open inside her—something that had been dead since before the zombie projects, before Tom's distance, maybe since before she could remember.

"I'm still here," she whispered to the fox, to herself, to the water that lapped at her feet. The fox twitched its ears, then slipped away into darkness, leaving her alone with the moon and the terrible, beautiful knowledge that she would have to keep swimming through it all.