Swimming With the Dead

The cat watched him from the windowsill—Mittens, his wife's cat, though she'd been gone six months now. Every morning it was the same: the cat's yellow eyes following him as he tied his tie, judging him silently for what he was about to do.

"It's just coffee," he told himself, but the bull had been sitting in his stomach since last Thursday when Sarah's hand had lingered on his arm at the copier. Coffee wasn't coffee anymore. Everything was charged with the weight of what he wasn't saying.

The pool was his only refuge now. He'd started swimming laps at 5 AM, the YMCA nearly empty, the water chlorinated and clean. There, underwater, he could pretend he was washing everything away—the grief, the guilt, the way his hands shook when he thought about Sarah's text messages lighting up his phone like small fires he couldn't extinguish. His mother had always said he was like a bull in a china shop, too stubborn to know when he was breaking things.

This morning, though, the water felt different. Heavy. As he pulled himself through lane four, counting strokes—one, two, three, breathe—he imagined his wife's voice. *You're swimming away from yourself,* she'd said once, years ago, when they'd fought about something stupid he couldn't remember now. She'd always seen right through him.

He surfaced, gasping. The lifeguard watched him from the chair, barely twenty, scrolling through her phone. She didn't know about the dead wife or the almost-affair or the way he'd lied to his mother yesterday when she'd asked how he was doing. *Fine,* he'd said. *Really, I'm fine.* The biggest bull he'd told in months.

Back at home, Mittens was still waiting. He poured food into the bowl, the cat weaving around his ankles, purring despite everything. The worst part was that the cat didn't judge. The cat just loved him, broken and all, which somehow made everything worse.

His phone buzzed. Sarah.

*Coffee still on?*

He stood over the sink, hands gripping the edge so hard his knuckles turned white. The cat rubbed against his leg, and for a moment he wanted to scoop Mittens up and bury his face in soft fur and cry until there was nothing left inside him.

Instead he typed: *Can't make it today.*

Then deleted it.

Then typed it again.

Behind him, the cat meowed, and somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled in like the ending of something that had been building for too long.