What the Water Remembers

The pool at the Sundowner Motel had seen better decades. Its turquoise paint peeled in lizard-scale patches, and the water held the faint chemical smell of too many chlorine treatments and not enough drainage.

Elara sat on the cracked plastic lounge chair, her legs pulled to her chest, watching a single goldfish—orange as a casino chip—swim lazy circles in the stagnant water. It shouldn't have been there. Someone must have dumped it from a bowl, a childhood pet set free in the wrong kind of ocean. Now it survived on mosquito larvae and the occasional crumbs from guests who thought they were being kind.

"You're going to burn," Marcus said, dropping onto the adjacent chair. He offered her a cigarette, already lit. She took it, their fingers brushing, and tried not to flinch.

"I'm already burned," she said.

He laughed, but his heart wasn't in it. Neither was hers. They'd been doing this dance for three years now—the secret meetings at mid-range hotels, the lies told over phones, the careful construction of parallel lives that never quite touched. Marcus was married. So was she, technically, though she and David had been living separate lives under the same roof since their daughter's funeral two years ago.

"My palm itches," Marcus said suddenly, rubbing his left hand against his thigh. "Old wives' tale means money's coming."

"Or you're having a reaction to the cheap motel soap."

"Elara." He turned to her then, really looked at her, and she saw what she always saw—desperation wrapped in desire, or maybe desire wrapped in desperation. "What are we doing?"

The goldfish surfaced, gulping air, then disappeared again.

"Surviving," she said. "Like that fish. Just circling the same water."

"We could leave," Marcus said. "Both of us. Just—go."

"To where?"

"Anywhere. Anywhere that isn't this. Isn't them."

Elara thought about David at home, probably sleeping in his chair again. She thought about Marcus's wife, whose name she'd never asked. She thought about her daughter, who would have been eight today, and how grief had carved her hollow, made her crave whatever pain or pleasure could make her feel something real.

She took a long drag from the cigarette, exhaling smoke that tasted like ash and regret. The afternoon heat pressed down on them, heavy and suffocating, like the water in that pool.

"Go ahead then," she said. "Leave."

Marcus stared at her. His palm stopped itching. The goldfish swam another circle.

"You won't come?"

"Someone has to feed the fish," she said, and stubbed out the cigarette against the plastic armrest, watching the ember die, watching the smoke rise and disappear, like everything does eventually.