The Static Between Us

Maria stared at the tangled mess of cables behind the television, her fingers hovering but not touching. This was his job—always had been. Richard was the cable guy in their marriage, the one who sorted and labeled and zip-tied everything into neat parallel lines. Maria was the one who left things plugged into the wrong ports, who couldn't tell HDMI from component, who lived in a house Richard had organized into submission.

Now Richard was gone—moved out three weeks ago after telling her he'd been feeling like a zombie for years, just going through the motions of their life together. The irony wasn't lost on her. She'd been the one sleepwalking, not him.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. Her boss, wanting her to come in early again. Maria felt that familiar hollow feeling, the corporate zombie shuffle starting before she even clocked in. She was thirty-seven and already her father's daughter in the worst way—hollowed out by hours of fluorescent lights and spreadsheets that didn't matter.

She reached for the cables, her hand brushing against something else caught in the dusty spiderweb behind the TV stand. A single hair. Long, dark, wrapped around a coaxial cable like it belonged there. She pulled it free and held it up to the light filtering through the blinds.

His hair. Not hers—she'd chopped hers off after the breakup, a dramatic chin-length bob that made her look like a stranger in the mirror. This was his, the lock she'd trimmed for him last summer because he couldn't see the split ends in the back. They'd sat on the back porch, wine glasses sweating on the table, while she combed his hair and snipped carefully, her fingers in the thick waves she'd loved running her hands through.

The hair was tangled around the cable in a perfect knot, as if it had been trying to hold something together.

Maria stared at it for a long moment, then wound the hair around her finger, watching it darken with a sudden thought. She could be the zombie Richard claimed she was. She could unplug these cables one by one, box up the television, sell the house, move into a downtown apartment. She could keep her job and shrink into herself until she was nothing but paper skin and hollow bones.

Or she could buy her own damn zip ties.

She set the hair aside, wrapped carefully in a tissue she pulled from her pocket, and began untangling the cables. It took thirty minutes. She used twist ties from bread bags and patience she hadn't known she still possessed. When she finished, the cables ran in neat parallel lines, labeled with a Sharpie she found in the junk drawer.

HDMI 1. Cable box. HDMI 2. Gaming system. Ethernet. Power.

The house was quiet. Maria went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, really looked, for the first time in months. There were new lines around her eyes. A single silver hair glinted at her temple.

She plucked it.

"Time to wake up," she said to the empty room.

The hair she placed in an envelope with Richard's name on it. The rest—that was hers to untangle.