The Art of Drowning

The pool was empty at 6 AM, which was exactly how Marco liked it. Forty-two years old and he'd finally inherited his father's insomnia, though he preferred to think of it as stolen time. He adjusted the faded **baseball** cap on his head — his father's, retrieved from the back of the closet after the funeral three months ago. It smelled of Old Spice and tobacco, scents that had been absent from the house for a decade but somehow still clung to the fabric like ghosts.

Marco lowered himself into the water. The cold shocked his lungs, the way it had when he was seven and his father had thrown him into the deep end of the community pool, shouting "Sink or swim, kid" like it was philosophy instead of cruelty. He'd swam then, and he was **swimming** now, though the strokes felt mechanical, rehearsed. The same laps, same number, same Tuesday ritual.

The **hat** waited on the pool deck, watching him like a judgment. His father had worn it every weekend to Marco's games, sitting in the bleachers with a cooler of beer and a running commentary on Marco's mediocre performance. "You swing like your mother," he'd say, and Marco would flinch, not because he cared about the insult but because his father never spoke of her otherwise.

Marco surfaced at the wall, gasping. The water had begun to warm to body temperature, losing its clarity. He thought about texting Sarah — she'd been asking him to talk about the funeral, about his father, about the silence that had settled between them like something you could measure. But what was there to say?

He climbed out, dripping onto the concrete, and picked up the hat. For weeks he'd been wearing it, as if his father's stubbornness might transfer through the fabric. Instead, he just felt the weight of everything unsaid, every missed opportunity, every game his father hadn't attended because work or pride or whatever else had mattered more.

Marco placed the hat on the pool deck where it wouldn't get wet. He didn't need it anymore. Tomorrow he would come alone to the pool, and for the first time in his life, he would simply swim.