The Dead Don't Float

Eleanor found him at the pool at midnight, floating on his back like a body that hadn't been discovered yet. The hotel's underwater lights cast his skin in a sickly blue, and for a moment she thought he actually was dead.

Then he moved. Slow. Deliberate. Nothing alive should move that slowly.

"You're becoming a zombie," she said, sitting on the edge and dipping her feet in the water. "Not the eating-brains kind. The walking kind. The ones that shuffle through life because something essential rotted away years ago and nobody had the courage to bury them."

Marcus didn't respond. Just watched the sky.

His iPhone sat on the deck chair, lighting up every few minutes with work emails. He'd stopped checking hours ago. The small deaths accumulated in the notification bubble.

She took a vitamin from her pocket and swallowed it dry. Another pill. Another day preserved. She'd started taking them two years ago, after the second miscarriage, as if she could optimize her body into compliance with some cosmic accounting error.

"Your hair's getting longer," Marcus said finally. It was the first personal thing he'd said to her in three weeks.

Eleanor touched it without thinking. She'd stopped cutting it when she stopped hoping. Now it fell past her shoulders, heavy and unfamiliar. "I don't recognize myself anymore."

"No," he said, still floating. "You don't recognize who you were. Those aren't the same thing."

She wanted to push him under. Just hold him down until the bubbles stopped. Instead she stood up, shaking water from her legs, and left him there in the pool that had become too much like their marriage—technically functional, chemically treated, and deep enough to drown in.

The iPhone lit up again. Someone wanted something. That was the world now: everyone hungry, nothing nourishing, all of them shuffling forward through the fluorescent-lit apocalypse with their pockets full of vitamins and their hearts full of static.

Marcus closed his eyes. Somewhere overhead, a plane carried people somewhere else. He stayed in the water, and Eleanor stayed in the world, and somehow both of them were drowning in exactly the same way.