The Art of Drowning

The mechanical **bull** at The Rusty Spur was painted an aggressive red, its hide scratched with layer upon layer of drunken determination. Elena watched it spin from her booth, vodka tonic sweating onto the coaster, thinking about how her father had ridden the actual bull market of the eighties like it owed him something—until the crash of '87 revealed his portfolio as hollow as his chest x-rays.

She'd come here after the funeral, though she wasn't sure why. Maybe to feel something other than the strange flatness that had settled over her since the hospice nurse called at 3 AM. Her father had spent forty years accumulating things he couldn't take with him, and now Elena was thirty-eight with a corner office she hated and a fiancé who'd proposed three weeks before the diagnosis, as if grief were just another item on their shared calendar.

Outside, rain streaked the window like water running down a drain. She'd always hated that metaphor—water didn't have to mean cleansing. Sometimes water just drowned you. Sometimes you were thirty-eight years old and realized you'd been holding your breath since you were twelve, since you learned that bearing witness wasn't the same as living.

The bartender refilled her drink. "You okay?"

Elena considered the question. She was sitting in a country-western bar at 2 PM on a Tuesday, her father's Rolex still ticking on her wrist though he'd been dead less than a week. She was supposed to be at work, closing a deal that would put her in the running for partner. Instead she was watching a mechanical bull throw men who wanted to prove something to themselves and a room full of strangers.

"My father died," she said, and it came out easier than she'd expected. "He spent his whole life riding things—stocks, horses, expectations. I think he forgot he could just get off."

The bartender nodded, like he heard this every day. Maybe he did.

"Last thing he told me," Elena continued, the words pouring out of her now, "he said, 'Don't **bear** it like I did.' Didn't say what. Didn't have to."

She slid off the stool, heels clicking on the floorboards. Outside, the rain had stopped. The street shimmered with puddles reflecting a sky that was finally, impossibly, beginning to clear.

Elena walked toward her car, not turning back toward the bar with its spinning bull and its temporary comforts. She could call Marcus. She could go to work. She could keep holding her breath.

Instead she stood in the middle of the parking lot and tilted her head back, letting the water dripping from the roof hit her face, and for the first time in years, she breathed.