Everything the Body Craves

The bull shark had been circling for days now. That's what Marcus called it—the dark, predatory shape of his depression, always just beneath the surface. He'd felt it since the promotion, since Elena left, since he stopped recognizing the man in the mirror.

Now he stood at his kitchen counter at 2 AM, mechanically sorting his supplements into one of those plastic organizers with days of the stamped into cheap plastic. Vitamin D for the windows he never saw. B-complex for energy he couldn't summon. Magnesium for the sleep that wouldn't come. The routine was the only thing holding him together.

He filled a glass from the tap, watched the water swirl, and thought about Elena telling him he was drowning in plain sight. She'd said it the night she walked out, her suitcase already in the car. "You're under water, Marcus. You just won't come up for air."

Outside, a storm was breaking. Lightning flashed, and in that split-second illumination, he saw it: the stack of unpaid bills, the empty takeout containers, the promotional plaque from his job collecting dust on the shelf. His corporate VP had told him that morning that the team needed to "grind harder," called him a "pit bull" for the way he negotiated deals. Marcus had nodded, swallowed the bile, kept his eyes on the quarterly targets.

He remembered his father's last words, spoken from a hospital bed surrounded by machines: "Don't forget to actually live, kid." His father had worked sixty-hour weeks until the cancer made the choice for him.

The glass of water sat on the counter. Marcus's phone buzzed on the counter—his boss, probably, with another "emergency" that wasn't.

Outside, another flash of lightning. This time it illuminated something else: the shadowy outline of the bottle his doctor had prescribed weeks ago. The one he'd never opened.

Marcus's hand hovered. Then he did something he hadn't done in months. He didn't take the vitamin. Didn't answer the phone. Didn't open the bottle.

He opened the window instead.

The rain hit his face, cold and real, and for the first time in what felt like forever, Marcus could breathe. The bull shark, he realized, had been circling something that wasn't there anymore. The man it was hunting had already drowned.

That left only one question: what, if anything, would surface in his place?

He stood in the rain and let himself not know the answer.