The Late Night Dog

Marcus installed cable for sixteen years. The job was simple: enter strangers' homes, drill through walls, connect them to the endless stream of everything happening everywhere else. He'd watched marriages dissolve in living rooms while he spliced coaxial cables. He'd seen children grow up in the background of service calls, their height marked against doorframes behind his ladder.

After Elena left, taking everything except his old dog Buster — a senior lab mix with cloudy eyes and a bad hip — Marcus started swimming at the YMCA. Every night at 10 PM, he'd slip into the chlorinated silence, lap after lap, his body remembering what his mind wanted to forget.

"You're always here," she said one night. She was maybe thirty, swimming laps in the adjacent lane, her stroke clean and efficient. Marcus, fifty-two and wearing himself thin on hope and repetition, could only nod before pushing off the wall again.

Weeks passed. The cable truck broke down. His supervisor quit. Marcus kept swimming. Buster's hips got worse, so Marcus started carrying him up the stairs to their apartment, the dog's weight warm and solid against his chest, the only thing that still needed him.

One night in the parking lot, the woman asked about Buster. "He's old," Marcus said, surprised by his own voice cracking. "Like me."

"He's beautiful," she said, and Marcus felt something open in his chest that had been sealed shut since the day Elena packed her boxes. "I'm Sarah, by the way."

She invited him to coffee. Marcus went. Buster waited at home, and for the first time in years, Marcus didn't feel like he was swimming alone in the dark.