Electrolytes

The storm had been raging for three hours, and Arthur's old golden retriever, Barnaby, hadn't left his side since the first crack of lightning splintered the sky. The dog's warm weight against Arthur's shin was the only tether keeping him from drifting entirely into the bottle of whiskey on the coffee table.

"You'd hate this," Arthur said to the empty room where Elena used to sit. She'd been dead eight months, and the silence she'd left behind was louder than any thunder.

Barnaby thumped his tail once, acknowledging her name the way he always did.

Arthur reached for the glass of water he'd poured hours ago, now lukewarm and sweating condensation onto the coaster. Elena had bought those coasters on their last vacation—to a place with actual sunshine, not this relentless Pacific Northwest gray. She'd been obsessed with hydration those final months, tracking his water intake like it was a stock market that might suddenly crash.

"Drink," she'd say, pressing the glass into his hand. "Your body is mostly water. Treat it like something sacred."

He swallowed now, dutiful as ever, though she wasn't there to witness it. Then he opened the vitamin container she'd stocked before the surgery that had killed her instead. The huge white pills were stamped with her careful handwriting on the lid: "TAKE DAILY. NO EXCUSES."

The lightning flashed again, illuminating the photograph on the mantelpiece. Elena laughing, sun in her hair, unaware that her body was already plotting its betrayal.

Arthur dry-swallowed the vitamin. It stuck in his throat like regret.

"I'm taking care of myself," he whispered to the room. "See?"

Barnaby lifted his head, sensing something in the air—the approaching edge of the storm, perhaps. Or maybe the dog had always been the wisest of them all, knowing that grief was not something you survived but something you learned to carry, like water in your lungs, like lightning in your bones, like love that refused to die even when you begged it to.

Arthur poured another drink. The dog settled back down with a sigh, and they waited together for the electricity to return, for the world to make sense again, for anything to feel like enough.