What are we doing here?

"Will you just talk to me?" Mark begged, as his ceiling fan completed lazy, insistent revolutions. He watched as a fly— he couldn’t say when it had arrived— performed small frantic circles in the air before settling on the nightstand beside him. It groomed its front legs. Such fastidiousness in something so fundamentally unclean.

He waved it away. "I can't do this on my own." he said to the ceiling, to the fan, to the woman beside him.

But of course he was already doing it alone. It had been months like this, pleading, bids for affection, and attention. He tried to pinpoint exactly when their relationship had soured, but doing so was like trying to pinpoint the exact day summer moved inexorably into winter. One season you were walking through warm evenings, the next you were pulling your coat tighter and wondering when the cold had crept in.

He looked to the window. The sun was gone. Replaced by the cold moon and Lily's colder shoulder.

There had been a time, a time just out of reach, when they’d laughed easily. When her presence had been a gift rather than an indictment of his ineffable impotence. Now they argued over bills, over who cleaned the litter box last— of a cat she’d adopted— always keeping score over minutiae.

The pillows between them in bed, arranged each night with the careful construction of opposing armies. A downy battle-line, he’d thought once, pleased with the phrase, though there was no one to share it with.

On the nightstand beside her, her phone lit up. Buzzing with that particular insistence that suggested this was not the first call, nor would it be the last. He didn’t look to see who it was. Probably him, whoever he was. The next conquest. The replacement. She’d been planning her exit for months— he’d known without knowing, the way you know a building is condemned, rotting, and unsound before it collapses.

He thought of mentioning their last vacation. Before everything curdled. The last time she looked at him with any warmth.

They'd stayed at a little boutique hotel with a mid-century modern aesthetic. The owner, with pretensions toward art, converted the upper floors into a midnight museum. They walked around at 3am, drunk, wearing scratchy terrycloth robes, sipping expensive wine from plastic cups— she never looked more beautiful to him. He’d given her a necklace that night. Gold, with a jade stone the color of Caribbean seawater. She’d looked at him then with something approaching warmth, or perhaps he’d only imagined it, had needed to imagine it so badly that he’d conjured the expression from nothing.

That week they playacted wealth, pretending they weren't just adding to a mountain of credit card debt.

Instead, he gazed with effete longing at the moon as it cast pale-blue light on her skin. Turning the notches of her spine into mountains. He reached out to place a hand on her bare shoulder. He just… missed the way it felt to touch her.

His weight shifted the bed and she rolled away, a soft groan escaping her lips. He let his hand fall, just shy of her bare skin. His head dropped.

"Don't… do that." He choked. "I just... want to be in love again."

She ignored him, she always ignored him during an argument. And it always pissed him off.

He looked at her hair, splayed across the bed. It had started to take on a brittle, greasy sheen. She used to take care of herself. Her hair never looked this... filthy.

Her phone lit up again, buzzing loud against the wooden table. He watched the fly land on her phone as the vibrating stopped.

"What are we doing here, Lily? What am I going to do without you?”

He stood up and walked over to the window running his fingers through his hair. The moon had turned the wet streets below into something almost beautiful, red and blue lights swimming in the standing water like tropical fish. He could see her reflection in the window glass now, could see his own face overlaid on hers, the two of them occupying the same impossible space.

He stared until his reflection blurred. When he turned back to the bed, the fly had landed on Lily’s forehead. Crawling along her brow. navigating the landscape of her face, the bridge of her nose. It paused at the corner of her eye—milky now, fixed on the ceiling fan’s endless rotation.

Mark moved to wave it away. Someone was knocking. Had been knocking. The sound resolved itself into words: Police. Welfare check. Then, with more insistence: Open the door.

She’d found the credit card statements.

The envelopes were still scattered across her nightstand, torn open with the violence of someone who has just discovered the full architecture of a betrayal. Fifteen thousand on the Discover card. Twenty on the MasterCard he’d opened in her name— only because his credit had been exhausted. She didn’t understand. The expensive hotels, wines with names he couldn’t pronounce—those were her choices. He gambled to keep up with her appetite. Every win went to her.

He’d been trying to build something beautiful with borrowed money and borrowed time, and she’d stood in their bedroom holding the evidence of his love and called it fraud.

She’d thrown the necklace at him.

Collapsed into bed. Pulled the blanket over her body. Retreating past the no-man’s land of pillows.

In retreat, she took one final shot.

“We’re done. I can’t go on like this.”

Rage filled him. His jaw clenched, threatening to crack teeth. He advanced. Can’t go on? As if she were the one suffering. As if he weren’t the one trying to hold together a life that was sliding away like water through his fingers.

He lunged. Hands around her neck. Tightening. Tightening. How. Dare. She. How dare she dismantle what he’d built, announce her departure as if she had that right, as if he weren’t still in love with her, as if love didn’t entitle him to something.

And suddenly she wasn’t moving.

The phone lit up again, vibrating. Her father’s face on the screen, the light catching the bruised necklace of violet and vermillion that encircled her throat.

He sank onto the bed beside her. Gas escaped her lips again in a fetid moan.

The knock came again, more insistent. A violent pounding thud. “Police! Open the door!”

Mark looked at Lily, at the fly now exploring the corner of her mouth, at the ceiling fan still turning with its mechanical patience.

“I just wanted to be in love.”