The Orange at Sunset

Maria peeled the orange with slow, deliberate movements, the citrus scent cutting through the stale air of the apartment. She could hear David in the other room—moving, shuffling, the familiar sounds of a man who'd been present in body only for three years. Her zombie husband. Not the undead kind from movies, but something worse: a living man who'd somehow forgotten how to live.

"Coming to bed?" David's voice drifted in, flat and gray.

"Soon."

Maria ate the orange one segment at a time, each burst of juice a tiny rebellion against the numbness that had become their marriage. She remembered when he used to look at her like she was the only woman in the room. When his hands had known the curves of her body better than his own heartbeat. Now he touched her only in passing, his fingers cold and absent, as if she were furniture he'd grown accustomed to.

The phone buzzed. A text from him, from the other room: *Don't wait up.*

She stared at those three words and felt something crack open inside her—something that had been frozen since the miscarriage, since the silence between them had grown thick enough to suffocate in.

Maria drove to the lake. The water was black under a moonless sky, but she stripped down to nothing and waded in anyway. The cold shocked her system as she began swimming, stroke after stroke, away from the shore, away from the zombie marriage, away from the woman she'd let herself become. Her arms moved with a ferocity she hadn't felt in years, cutting through water that felt like baptism and drowning all at once.

She didn't turn back until her muscles burned, until her breath came in ragged gasps, until she remembered what it felt like to be alive. Treading water in the middle of the lake, Maria finally cried—gut-deep sobs that rose from the place where hope had been buried.

The shore was still there when she returned. David was probably still there too, existing in his twilight state between presence and absence. But something had changed. She floated on her back, the water holding her like a lover who still knew how to touch her, and understood that sometimes you have to let yourself almost drown to remember why you want to breathe.