The Sphinx at the Pool's Edge

The pool at the Omni Hotel had that perfect turquoise emptiness that only exists in expensive places. Forty-two years old and she still felt like she was drowning in shallow waters. Her sphinx cat, Cleo, sat on the lounge chair beside her, all naked skin and ancient wisdom, watching Ellen float on her back in the chlorinated silence.

"You're staring at me," Ellen said, not opening her eyes.

"I'm a cat. That's what we do. Also, you've been in there for an hour. The wrinkling is irreversible."

Cleo had appeared on Ellen's fire escape three years ago, hairless and pregnant, during the week Mark moved out. Sometimes Ellen wondered if the cat could actually speak, or if she'd simply gone mad from solitude. It didn't matter either way.

"Remember when we were twenty?" Ellen asked the ceiling. "We thought we'd be somebody by now."

"We are somebody," Cleo said, licking a paw. "We're the kind of people who can afford a hotel pool on a Tuesday afternoon. That's not nothing."

Ellen thought about the office. The betting pool on when she'd finally crack. The way her boss looked at her across meetings, like she was a puzzle he couldn't quite solve. The goldfish in the reception area's tank, swimming their endless circles, mouths opening and closing in silent screams.

"My mother kept goldfish in a bowl," Ellen said. "One bowl. She thought they were happy. I didn't have the heart to tell her they were slowly poisoning themselves in their own waste."

"What are you saying, Ellen?"

"I'm saying I think I'm the goldfish. I think we're all the goldfish."

A man in a suit approached the edge of the pool. He had that look—mid-thirties, already tired, already resigned. He held a tumbler of something amber and expensive.

"Pool's closed for maintenance," he said, though it clearly wasn't.

"I work here," Ellen lied, treading water.

"No," he said, setting down his drink. "You don't."

He sat on the edge, dipped his fingers in the water. Something unreadable passed across his face. Sadness, recognition, the particular ache of seeing someone else's unhappiness and recognizing your own.

"My wife had a sphinx," he said finally. "Before."

"Before what?"

"Before everything."

Ellen swam to the edge. The cat watched them both with those unblinking eyes that had seen empires rise and fall, or maybe just a lot of lonely people in hotel pools.

"The thing about goldfish," the man said, "is that if you put them in a pond, they grow. They become what they were supposed to be."

"Most people don't know that," Ellen said.

"Most people don't want to."

He stood up, picked up his drink, and walked away without looking back. Cleo jumped down from the chair and pressed her warm, hairless body against Ellen's wet arm when she finally pulled herself from the water.

"We should go," the cat said softly. "We're not goldfish anymore."