Electric Greens

Margaret stood at the kitchen counter, her fingers stained green from chopping spinach. The storm outside made the kitchen lights flicker—brief flashes that reminded her of camera flashes at weddings, the kind that captured moments you couldn't take back.

She'd always loved cooking for him. The way his eyes would light up when she made something healthy, something that said *I want you to live forever*. Now the spinach sat in a colander like a pile of discarded dreams, waiting to be wilted into nothing.

Her hair had started showing silver at the temples last year. He'd pretended not to notice, but she'd caught him looking—那种 mix of tenderness and calculation that had made her stomach drop. Like he was already pricing the cost of her aging against his options.

Lightning struck somewhere close. The kitchen went pitch black for three seconds.

In the darkness, Margaret understood something with sudden, terrible clarity: she'd been preparing this meal for weeks, maybe months. The spinach, the careful chopping, the Performance of Being Good. And he'd already left, really. His body was still in the house, still asleep upstairs, but whatever they'd been building together had dissolved somewhere between her last birthday and his promotion.

The lights buzzed back on.

She scraped the spinach into the trash.

Upstairs, the floorboards creaked. His footsteps, soft and familiar, approaching the kitchen doorway.

"Smells good," he said, running a hand through his hair—still thick, still the same brown she'd fallen for fifteen years ago.

Margaret turned, her smile already assembling itself like a reflex she couldn't unlearn. "Almost ready."

Some loves don't end with lightning. They just wilt slowly, like forgotten greens in the crisper drawer, until one day you realize you've been nourishing nothing but the habit of staying.