The Last Cable

Sarah stood in the living room, watching the cable guy coil the thick black wire like a dead snake. 'All set,' he said, avoiding her eyes. He knew—the way they always knew when they were disconnecting a life.

'Thank you,' she said, closing the door behind him. The house echoed with the sudden silence. No more background news to fill the empty spaces where David's laughter used to be.

Her phone buzzed. David's text: *Don't forget to feed the goldfish.* As if she could forget. As if the goldfish wasn't swimming in its glass prison, oblivious to the careful custody arrangement they'd hammered out at 2 AM over lukewarm coffee. She got it on weekends. David got it during the week. The fish neither knew nor cared that their marriage had dissolved around it.

The Realtor had called her 'foxy' yesterday. She'd bristled. That word—David used to call her that in the beginning, before everything hardened. Before the job swallowed him whole, before the nights he came home smelling of expensive Scotch and someone else's perfume. She'd been naive enough to believe his lies. Some women never learned.

She walked into the bedroom, the box marked 'HIS' still sitting by the door. She'd have to bear it—packing away six years of photographs, of Christmas ornaments, of the life they'd built on a foundation of quicksand. People always said divorce was like a death. They were wrong. Death was final. This was a slow-motion amputation.

Their dog, Buster, had chosen David. Of course he had. Dogs could smell desperation, could sense which human was crumbling. Buster now lived in David's sleek new apartment, probably sleeping on the Italian leather sofa. Sarah wondered if he ever looked for her, if his loyalty extended beyond whoever filled the bowl.

She poured wine, sat on the floor, and cried until she was empty. Then she stood up, fed the goldfish, and called her mother. Tomorrow she would find a new apartment. Tomorrow she would start again. But tonight, she just let herself break.