The Memory of Water

The hotel pool was empty at 11 PM, which was exactly why Elena had come down. Her iPhone lay face-up on the lounger, screen illuminated with a text message she'd been staring at for twenty minutes:

*I think we should see other people.*

Not *I've met someone else.* Not *I'm leaving.* Just a suggestion, as if they were discussing dinner plans.

She slipped into the water. The temperature shocked her skin—too cold, then suddenly perfect. She floated on her back, staring at the ceiling where recessed lights created artificial constellations. Somewhere above, twenty floors up, her husband Mark was probably sleeping. Or maybe he was with HER, the colleague whose name kept appearing on his calendar at odd hours.

A splash broke the surface.

Elena righted herself. Near the pool's edge, something orange darted through the blue—a goldfish, impossibly alive in this chlorinated void. It circled once, twice, its movements deliberate despite its transplanted home.

"How did you get here?" she whispered.

The goldfish seemed to consider her, its glassy eye reflecting the pool lights. Then it descended, following the slope of the bottom.

She dove after it.

The underwater world was silent, muffled. She watched the goldfish drift deeper, its bright body stark against the pale tiles. Five feet. Eight feet. The hotel pool had no deep end—uniformly shallow throughout, safe for guests who'd had too much to drink at the conference.

The goldfish reached the bottom and kept going.

Elena's lungs burned. She surfaced, gasping, and something in her chest cracked open—the same way it had when Mark stopped coming home for dinner, the same way it had when she realized he deleted texts before handing her his phone.

She retrieved her iPhone from the lounger. The message glowed in the darkness.

*I think we should see other people.*

Elena typed back: *I think we should too.*

She hit send, then powered off the device. The black glass reflected her face—freckled from the afternoon sun, eyes rimmed with exhaustion. A stranger's face, almost.

The goldfish bobbed to the surface, belly-up.

Elena watched it for a long moment. Then she climbed out of the pool, water dripping from her skin like memory, like time, like the last five years of a marriage that had been beautiful once, in the beginning, before everything went shallow and strange.

She left the goldfish floating there—a bright comma at the end of a sentence she was finally finished writing.