What the Lightning Takes

The pool had gone still, that flat dead calm that comes before a storm. Maya stood at the edge, her champagne warm in the glass, watching the water reflect nothing — not the party lights strung across the patio, not the guests in their various states of unraveling, not the sky gathering itself above them.

Three years ago, this pool. Elena's body floating there like something careless, a towel dropped wrong. No struggle. No violence. Just the silence of water and the chlorine smell that still lived in Maya's nose, that would probably always live there.

"You're not swimming."

She didn't turn. Daniel. Always Daniel, showing up at the wrong moments, saying the wrong things, being the wrong version of the person she'd actually needed.

"I don't swim anymore."

"You used to love it. You and Elena both."

The name was a door kicked open in a dark room. Maya felt it through her whole body.

"That was before."

"Before what?" He stepped closer, and she could see his pupils, blown wide despite the ambient light. "Before she died? Before you stopped letting yourself feel anything? Before you decided that living halfway through life was enough?"

"Daniel — "

"No, seriously. What happened to you? We were friends, Maya. Actual friends. And now you're just this person I see at parties, standing by pools you won't swim in, drinking champagne you don't want, pretending to be somewhere else entirely."

She wanted to tell him about the goldfish. The one Elena had won at a carnival when they were twelve, how they'd buried it in the park under a oak tree, how they'd cried like it mattered, like loss was something you could practice. How loss was actually nothing like practice.

"I'm not pretending."

"Then swim."

"What?"

"Swim. Right now. Get in the water. Be in it."

Lightning cracked the sky open, white and absolute, and for one second the pool was illuminated — a blue rectangle cut into the earth, an absence waiting to be filled.

Maya set down her champagne. She pulled her dress over her head. Daniel looked away, like she'd handed him something fragile.

The water was cold. It was always cold. She submerged herself entirely, holding her breath at the bottom, watching the lightning turn the water into something electric, something alive. Down there, in the quiet, she could almost hear Elena's laughter, could almost believe that some things don't end — they just change shape.

When she broke the surface, gasping, Daniel was crouched at the edge, his hand extended.

"Better?" he asked.

Maya pulled herself up, water streaming from her hair, from her skin. She didn't take his hand.

"No," she said. "But I'm done drowning."

The storm broke then, rain falling through the lightning, and they stood there together, not touching, not speaking, while the pool filled with the sky's tears.