Transmission

The lake was frozen except where the stream fed in—liquid water moving against the ice, defiant and dark. Elena stood at the edge, her father's fishing hat pulled low against the wind. The wool smelled like him: tobacco and cedar and all the silences they'd never filled.

Her iphone buzzed in her pocket. Third time this hour. Mark.

She didn't answer.

The funeral had ended three hours ago. Her mother had cried elegantly, appropriately. Elena had stood in the back, wearing this hat, feeling like a thief. Now the lake waited, gray and endless, and she thought about how her father had sat here for forty years, catching nothing, saying less.

The phone buzzed again. A text this time: "I know you're hurting. Please let me come over."

Mark's kindness exhausted her. His patience was a room she couldn't breathe in.

She took the hat off and laid it on the dock. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out the phone—smooth black glass, warm against her cold fingers. Screen lit up with messages she couldn't bring herself to read.

Her father had owned a flip phone until the day he died. No texting. No apps. Just calls. He'd said once that people talked too much already without carrying their conversations in their pockets.

The lake's current moved steadily, carrying dead leaves and fragments of ice toward the deep middle.

Elena's grip tightened on the phone. Mark was probably worried. He was good at worry. He was good at everything she'd spent three years trying to love but couldn't.

She threw it.

The phone arced perfectly, caught the weak sunlight, and vanished into the dark water. No splash—just the water swallowing it whole, like it had been waiting for this moment forever.

She put the hat back on. The wind bit at her ears. Her pocket felt light, empty.

For the first time in years, she could hear the lake moving.