The Cable Guy's Last Tuesday

The cat was dead when I found it behind the TV console, stiff as forgotten resentment. I'd come to reattach the cable that had been pulled loose during whatever argument had shattered this living room. The woman—Martha, she'd said, though the name felt wrong on her tongue—stood by the sliding glass doors, staring at her swimming pool as if the water might offer answers to questions she'd stopped asking years ago.

"He loved baseball," she said, not turning around. The pool was drained, a concrete scar in the backyard. "Every Saturday during season, like clockwork. Then he stopped watching. Stopped caring about anything except the cable bill."

I knelt beside the cat, whose fur still smelled faintly of something sweet—vanilla, maybe, or the ghost of a life that had warmth in it. My wife had left three months ago. The apartment she'd taken didn't allow pets. Our cat had gone with her, along with the good towels and the will to pretend anything mattered beyond getting through each day without screaming.

"This one's been gone a while," I said.

Martha turned then. Her eyes were the color of water that's been sitting too long in a glass. "I know. I've been meaning to... but then what? Move on? Find something else to care about?" She laughed, a dry, humorless sound. "At least the cable still works. That's what they tell me, right? As long as you can still watch other people live their lives, you're fine."

The pool's drain was clogged with debris—dead leaves, twigs, things that had once been part of something alive. I thought about my ex-wife's new boyfriend, how he probably took her to actual baseball games, not just watched them on the cable I installed for strangers who couldn't look each other in the eye.

"I can take him," I said, gesturing to the cat. "I know a place."

Martha studied me for a long moment, really looked at me, like I was the first human she'd actually seen in years. "You're kind," she said softly. "That's worse than being cruel, don't you think? It gives people hope."

I buried the cat behind an abandoned baseball field two towns over. The dirt was hard, unyielding. When I returned to my truck, my phone showed seven new installation requests. The cable company didn't care about dead cats or drained pools or the way hope could hurt more than emptiness ever could. There was just work, and then whatever came after, and eventually, the long silence that waits for us all, patient and absolute as water rising to drown everything we thought we were building.