The Pool at Midnight

The storm broke just as Maya slipped out the sliding door, leaving the hotel room where Daniel still slept. The pool shimmered below — an empty black mirror, save for the single underwater light casting wavy reflections against the concrete.

She'd been running for three months now. From Seattle to Portland, from Portland to San Francisco, and finally here, to some nameless coastal town where Daniel had suggested they "find themselves again." But the only thing Maya had found was that you cannot escape your own patterns.

Her iphone buzzed in her hand — the third text from her mother tonight. She didn't need to look to know it would be something about her father's health, or money, or why she hadn't visited since Christmas. She tapped the screen dark and set it on the deck chair, face down like a confession she wasn't ready to make.

The first lightning strike turned everything white. She counted. One, two, three — the thunder rolled across the ocean, a low growl that vibrated in her chest. She used to love storms. Daniel had held her during their first one, eight years ago in a drafty apartment in Chicago, whispering that the world was ending and wouldn't that be romantic?

Now the world just kept stubbornly existing.

A cat materialized from the shadows — a gaunt orange thing with one shredded ear. It considered her with yellow eyes, then padded silently to the pool's edge and began drinking from the chlorinated water. Maya watched it, envying its simple certainty. The cat knew what it needed. The cat took what was offered.

"You're not supposed to drink that," she whispered.

The cat looked at her, unimpressed, and returned to its drinking.

Her phone lit up again — Daniel, this time. A photo of them from yesterday, both smiling against a sunset neither had really watched. The caption read: "Remember this?" as if she could forget. As if she wasn't already forgetting who she'd been before she'd started bending herself around his expectations like wire around a circuit.

Another flash of lightning, closer this time. The storm was moving inland, toward the hotel, toward Daniel sleeping in room 312, toward everything she'd built and abandoned and rebuilt until she couldn't tell the difference between construction and destruction anymore.

Maya stood up. The cat watched her go, still drinking from the pool. She left her phone on the chair. Some things, she decided, you don't take with you when you finally stop running.