The Empty Pool

The pool had been draining for weeks. Sarah watched from the kitchen window as the water level receded, exposing the cracked concrete bottom like a wound that refused to heal. Beside her, Buster — their elderly golden retriever — whined softly, his tail giving a single thwack against the linoleum.

"I know, buddy," she whispered.

It had been three months since David's funeral, three months since anyone had slipped into that chlorinated blue water. David had built the pool for their tenth anniversary, a surprise gift that had felt more like a monument to his persistence than romance. He'd wanted a place to entertain colleagues, to show off the success that had come to define him. Sarah had wanted a dog. Buster had been her compromise prize.

Now the pool sat empty, a graveyard of summer memories. Sarah had drained it after the party following David's memorial — all those people in dark clothes, drinking wine by the water's edge, pretending to mourn a man most of them had barely known. Someone had fallen in. Drunk. Laughter rising like smoke against the twilight.

She couldn't look at the water anymore without tasting that night's bitterness.

Buster's whining grew louder. He scratched at the glass door, wanting out.

"Alright," she said, opening it. The afternoon air hit her — humid, heavy, suffocating. Buster trotted to the pool's edge and stood looking down, his golden fur catching the sunlight. He turned back to her, something like expectation in his clouded eyes.

And suddenly Sarah understood. He was waiting for the ritual they'd shared every summer evening: David tossing the tennis ball into the water, Buster launching himself after it with joyous splashes, both of them emerging wet and grinning.

That was the thing about dogs — they remembered what you wanted to forget.

Sarah filled a bowl with water from the garden hose and set it near the deep end. Buster drank gratefully, then lay beside her as they sat together on the concrete edge. Below them, where water used to be, a single tennis ball rested against the drain, bleached pale by the sun.

She reached for David's cigarettes in her pocket, lit one, and exhaled smoke into the gathering dusk. Tomorrow she'd call someone to refill it. Tomorrow she'd try to swim again. But for tonight, sitting with her dog in the skeleton of their marriage, this was enough.