The Fox at the Edge of Everything

The pool at the Sunset Motor Court had seen better decades. Its concrete was cracked, its water slightly milky, but it was theirs — every Thursday at 4 PM, Marcus and Elena would slide into the tepid water and pretend their marriage wasn't also dissolving into something murky and unrecognizable.

Today, Elena pressed her palms against the pool's rough bottom. She'd stopped taking her vitamins three weeks ago — those little capsules of optimism her therapist swore would help with the 'chemical imbalance' that supposedly explained why she'd started crying in her car during lunch breaks. Instead, she'd begun keeping them in a soap dish by the kitchen sink, tiny promises she broke daily.

"You're quiet," Marcus said, floating on his back. His wedding ring flashed in the dying light.

"Just thinking."

"About what?"

About the fox she'd seen yesterday, standing in their backyard at dawn, its coat impossibly orange against the gray winter grass. It had looked right at her with eyes that seemed to know everything — about the credit card debt Marcus was hiding, about her mother's declining health, about the letter from her ex-boyfriend that she'd received and burned and thought about every day since. The fox had known. Then it had turned and vanished under the fence, elegant and merciless.

"About how we used to be happy," Elena said instead.

Marcus's feet touched bottom. He moved toward her through the water. "We can be again."

Lightning split the sky — a jagged white tear that made them both flinch. Rain began falling, heavy warm drops that sizzled as they hit the pool's surface. Neither moved to get out.

"I saw a fox yesterday," Elena said. "It looked at me like it was waiting for something to die."

Marcus reached for her hand underwater. His fingers were cold. "Maybe it was just hungry."

"Maybe," she said. "Or maybe it knew."

"Knew what?"

She looked at him through the rain. "That we're already dead. We just haven't stopped moving yet."

The lightning flashed again, closer this time. For a moment, everything was illuminated — the pool's broken edge, the rusted lounge chairs, the brutal honesty on her husband's face. He didn't deny it. He just squeezed her hand, once, and let go.

Tomorrow she would start taking her vitamins again. Tomorrow she would call her mother. Tomorrow she would decide what came after this. But tonight, in the rain and the dying light, she simply floated beside the man she had loved for twelve years and mourned him as if he were already gone.