I: FLOAT

Tonight, F insists on going to the pub. He puts on the clothes he thinks he looks best in, buffs his shoes, and combs back his hair with gel, and he places himself firmly at the foot of their bed. What’s the point of coming halfway across the world if you’re just going to stay in the hotel? he says.

K does not answer; that coming halfway across the world may have, in fact, been pointless; that the room’s polished edges make it feel like all the other hotel rooms she has ever been in and will ever be in; that the blankets are heavy enough to displace all sensation of the outside world; that the glow of the television is warm and comforting; that a tight, nauseating embrace has drawn her in and refuses to let her go — and that she has not yet found it within herself to ask to be let go either — is too honest to say out loud.

F sits down beside her and slips his hands underneath the blankets and slowly massages her feet; he has always been great at this, K thinks. He presses into the soles of her feet and looks up. K pulls her feet away. What’s the point? she says flatly. To be together, he says. He cocks his head slightly to the left. Come out with me, please? F asks. Please?

The pub is not far from the hotel. In fact, in this small fishing village on the edges of northern Spain, nothing is far from anything. The village, cradled between a spine of gentle cliffs and a rough, gray sea, is heavy with tourists who, upon arrival, turn swiftly to butterflies. The sky is so obscured by a low fog of light-winged creatures, no one can be sure of what the time is. The butterflies are in constant motion, such that the narrow streets are drowned in an incessant flapping of wings, each one the first sign of a storm. F and K are butterflies too.

The pub has not yet begun to overflow when F and K arrive. It is quite small, lit by dull lights like old, folded sunsets and full of stumbling bodies, all fluttering in circles on an invisible, drunken carousel that floats haltingly past the bar (an oaken, straight line pockmarked with rings and stars of wine and whiskey) and through a careful pattern of wooden tables and chairs, and past a broken but good-looking jukebox, and to and from a pair of bathrooms, which are sticky and smell of urine and blood orange air freshener.

F speaks broken Spanish charmingly. He smiles apologetically for his mispronunciations and often stops mid-sentence to ask for a word, or to check in and see if he is being understood. K does not speak Spanish and when she tries, slips awkwardly into French (the only foreign language she knows). F has not decided whether he finds it adorable or embarrassing. The bartender tells them they look lovely together. F’s wings, thin and translucent, are light blue speckled with emerald, and K’s are the color of mangoes, a sun-kissed yellow. She’s beautiful, you’re right, F says, smiling at the bartender.

K finds herself speaking with the couple sitting beside her. The couple is on their honeymoon. The husband runs a hedge fund, the wife is a lawyer, they were barely able to make the time for this trip — no, they do not see children in their future, and though they live somewhere now, they want to live somewhere else later, and so on and so forth.

K thinks of her honeymoon so many years ago. They had gone to a small island in the Pacific. On the last day, F and K had paddled out to where the waves swelled and broke against them like violent embraces — pulling them in, pushing them away. They had tried and tried again to stand up straight on their surfboards. Each time, a wall of water knocked them down and swallowed them whole. K remembers being underwater: always, the sense that she would never see F again, the endless flailing of all her limbs as she struggled to the surface. She wanted to quit within the first hour, but F refused. He insisted that each time they lasted a second longer on the board was a victory. They tried all day until it was dark. K thought then that F’s blind struggle against things was his best quality; he didn’t know when, or how, to give up. Then, exhausted, they had lain in the sand and looked up at the night sky, at all the little perforations in its black dome. What’s next? K had asked. I don’t know, but it will be good, F had said.

Now, F is telling the newlywed couple about their life: He met K in high school, they dated on and off through college and soon, they married and K was pregnant, and then pregnant again. They raised their children in the city and, in the last two years, sent them both off to college — on full scholarships, he adds proudly. F was just made partner at his law firm and K likes her job teaching middle school mathematics. Now that the children are gone, there is so much more time for them to spend together.

K remembers a time when she loved to watch F talk. His lips pushed sounds out in the gentlest way. He made each word feel like it was the truth. That night, though they came together, neither one makes any effort to speak directly to the other; being there fills the silence and seems, at least, like an attempt at speaking.

She thinks of all the things he left out in his summary — all those hollow stretches of time between the big things that have kept them occupied for so long. She wonders if he has simply forgotten, or if he remembers, and is foolishly crashing into the waves again. She knows, somewhere, that she is not, that she is at the bottom of the ocean, amongst the fish and the reefs; she wonders if she will ever swim to the surface again.

Soon, F has a whole host of new friends and has left K alone at the bar. He glides to the top of the room, floating precariously close to the ceiling fan, and announces that all the drinks that night are on him. He hoots and his excited wings catch the light in a spectacular trick of radiance. I love you all! I’ll never forget any of you! he exclaims. The pub embraces him wildly, howling his name in joy. K, nursing a cognac, scoffs disdainfully. She looks at F, flitting from corner to corner, and wishes he wasn’t the way he is. She wishes she was like him. Wanting to leave, K calls his name. F! F? she says. He does not respond. The man sitting beside her sees her waving at F, who is in the middle of a young group of men all gleefully slapping each other on the back, and says, That guy is funny. He your husband? No, K says. She pauses. Then, Want to leave? she asks.

K pulls F from his crowd of admirers for a second and tells him that she is leaving. F, his little butterfly body ecstatic with the pub’s adoration, widens his eyes and drunkenly takes K’s hands in his. Stay, please, he says. I want you to stay. She pulls her hand away from his. We haven’t said a word to each other all night, she says. There’s no point in going on like this. I’m going home with him, she says, gesturing to the man at the bar. F stares at her, the man, her again. K sighs and wishes him a goodnight, and flutters into the street, the man one step behind her.

—Yash Kumbhat’s ‘21 column of serialized fiction is called ‘Little Deaths’ and is a triptych of short stories that explore the literal and figurative interpretations of a ‘petite mort.’