The Weight of Water

The betting pool at work had reached four thousand dollars. Everyone wanted to know when Marcus would finally crack — the man was a pyramid of carefully constructed composure, perfect in his suit, his tie, his life. I'd put fifty on next Tuesday.

We'd been something like friends once, before the pyramid scheme. Before he convinced half the office to invest in that crypto scam that collapsed like a house of cards. I'd lost eight thousand. He'd lost his soul, or so I told myself, nursing my resentment like a secret lover.

Now he swam laps at the community pool every evening at six. I knew this because I followed him there sometimes, sitting in the bleachers like a ghost haunting its own murder. The pool lights cast rippling shadows across his back as he moved through the water, endless and methodical. A human goldfish in a glass box, going nowhere.

'You're here again,' he said one evening, dripping on the concrete beside me. He wasn't wearing his hat — a ridiculous fedora he'd affected since the crash. Without it, he looked smaller. Fragile.

'Just watching,' I said.

He sat beside me, not looking at me. 'The goldfish we won at that carnival. Remember?'

'You flushed it after three days.'

'I flushed it because you were going to name it Hope.' He turned then, and his eyes were devastating. 'Some things aren't meant to survive.'

The pyramid of my anger collapsed. I saw it then — the way he'd carried my loss along with his, how the scheme had eaten him too. We sat there as the pool lights flickered, two broken people in the humid dark, not friends, not enemies, not anything that could be named.

I never collected my winnings from the pool. Marcus stopped swimming. And somewhere between the chlorine and the silence, we both learned that some wounds don't heal — they just learn to hold water.