The Art of Drowning

The vitamin bottle sat on her counter like a small plastic accusation. She'd been taking them for six months since her mother's mastectomy—some desperate bid at control in a world that seemed determined to demonstrate how little she actually had. D3 with K2, magnesium, fish oil that left her burping oceanic all morning. Rituals of the terrified.

Her phone lit up with another message from Mark. 'Coffee? Need to talk.' She'd known him since they were twelve, since that summer when he'd thrown a baseball through her bedroom window and she'd made him pay for it in hours of conversation on her front porch. Now he was VP of something or other at the firm where they both worked, and she was discovering that friendship has a price point she'd never bothered to negotiate.

'Everything okay?' his text read. 'You've been distant.'

She set down the phone and looked at Buster, her golden retriever, who had stopped eating three days ago. The vet said liver failure, maybe months, maybe weeks. She'd carried him from the car yesterday, his familiar weight suddenly foreign, his ribs prominent beneath her palms like some terrible topography. He looked at her now with those amber eyes that had witnessed her divorce, her promotion, her lonely Thursday nights with wine and takeout, asking nothing except that she stay.

'Did you know about the restructuring?' Mark had asked last week, his voice too casual across the restaurant table. She hadn't. She'd found out the same way everyone else: the email announcement, her name conspicuously absent from the new org chart. Mark had known. Mark had participated in the meetings. Mark was still her friend, or said he was, even as he collected the stock options that came with throwing her under the bus.

She ran water in the sink, watching it swirl down the drain. Some days she felt like she was already gone, just watching herself move through the hours like a ghost haunting its own life. The corporate reorganization. The dog's diagnosis. The vitamins that tasted like panic on her tongue. All of it just water flowing toward some inevitable conclusion.

Her phone buzzed again. 'Please. Five minutes.'

She turned off the faucet and sat on the kitchen floor next to Buster, resting her forehead against his warm flank. He sighed, a sound like settling dust. Outside, spring was happening without her. Somewhere children were playing baseball, parents cheering from bleachers, people falling in and out of love, making and breaking friendships, all of it moving forward in ways she couldn't seem to manage anymore.

The vitamins. The friend who wasn't. The dog dying. The baseball memories of a simpler time. The water that wouldn't stop flowing. She was forty-three years old and she couldn't remember the last time she'd felt solid, certain, anything like whole.

Buster licked her hand, his tongue rough and perfect and real. Some things, she thought, still demanded to be felt. She picked up her phone and typed back: 'Come over. Bring tequila.' The water would keep flowing. Might as well learn to swim in it.