The Lightning Season

The hotel pool was empty at 2 AM, which was exactly why Maya chose it. She'd left David sleeping in room 412—his breathing still even, his arm draped across the space where she should have been. The **pool** water reflected the distant glow of the city, black and rippling like oil.

She'd cut her **hair** that morning in the hotel bathroom. Seven inches gone, sacrificed to the sink. David hadn't noticed. He'd been too busy watching the **baseball** game on the suspended television, commentary murmuring like a prayer he couldn't quite remember. The Royals were losing. Everything was losing.

The **cable** had gone out sometime around midnight. David had cursed at the screen, then turned to her with that look—that soft, desperate look that meant he was about to say something genuine, something that might require actual vulnerability. Maya had pretended to be asleep.

Now, poolside, she lit a cigarette she didn't actually want. The first drag tasted like regret.

**Lightning** cracked the sky open—a sudden, violent fracture that illuminated everything: the empty lounge chairs, the CLOSED sign swinging on the gate, her own pale reflection in the dark water. For one stark second, she saw herself clearly: thirty-five years old, married to a man who loved her in the ways he knew how, which was not the ways she needed.

The rain came hard then, flattening her new short hair against her skull, washing away the hotel chlorine smell, the motel soap scent, the accumulated weight of three days pretending everything was fine.

She thought about waking him. She thought about packing. She thought about how the cable repairman was scheduled for 8 AM and how David would be annoyed if she wasn't there to let him in.

Maya sat in the rain until her skin pruned, until the cigarette burned down to her fingers, until she couldn't tell if she was crying or if it was just the rain. Then she went back upstairs, dripping and recalculating, to the room where the game had ended and the marriage hadn't, not quite, not yet.