The Lightning in the Wire

The vitamin bottle sat on his nightstand, a monument to optimism he'd stopped believing in three months ago. Arthur swallowed one anyway — the placebo effect was all he had left since Elena walked out.

He was forty-seven, three weeks from unemployment, and staring at the coaxial cable dangling from his wall like a dead snake. The cable guy was coming between 2 and 6, which meant Arthur would spend another afternoon waiting for a stranger to fix something that shouldn't matter.

The hat was hers. A wide-brimmed thing she'd worn to that disastrous garden party, the one where they'd both pretended not to hate everyone there. He should throw it out. He should throw out a lot of things.

Lightning cracked the sky open at 3:47 PM, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the afternoon gloom. The knock came two minutes later.

She was younger than he expected, with tired eyes and a clipboard that seemed to weigh down her entire left side. "Cable repair?"

Arthur stepped back without speaking. She moved through his living room with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd seen hundreds of apartments just like this — the boxes packed but not taped, the furniture arranged around absent presences, the plastic-wrapped mattresses.

"Your splitter's corroded," she said, flashlight beam cutting through the dim room. "Water damage, probably. You want me to replace it?"

"Does it matter?"

She looked at him really looked at him, and Arthur felt suddenly transparent. "You'd be surprised what matters."

The hat on the coatrack caught her eye. "That yours?"

"My wife's. Ex-wife."

"Nice." She reached out, then stopped. "She's not coming back, is she?"

"No."

"Then you should probably put on her hat."

Arthur stared at her. "What?"

"Try it on."

He did. It was too big, flopping over his ears. She laughed, and it was the first genuine sound he'd heard in this apartment in months.

"See?" She finished tightening the connector. "Sometimes you have to wear someone else's things to remember who you are."

Lightning flashed again, and for a second, Arthur saw something almost like hope reflected in her tired eyes.

"The cable's working now," she said at the door. "But you might want to try the vitamins again. They work better when you actually want to be here."

Arthur took off the hat. He didn't throw it out.