Inventory of Absence

The divorce lawyer said to make a list. Marlena sat at the kitchen table with yellow legal paper, her pen hovering over the first line.

The **cat**, Barnaby, had appeared at their door the first week of marriage, wet and mewing, and David had insisted they keep him despite Marlena's allergies. Now he slept on David's side of the bed they'd already sold, his orange fur matted with grief. Marlena hadn't decided if she wanted him. Some things, she'd learned, were better left unclaimed.

The **goldfish** bowl sat on the windowsill, two comets swimming in endless circles. David's anniversary gift last year—a joke about their relationship's lack of forward momentum that had stopped being funny somewhere around year seven. She'd forgotten to feed them after he moved out. They floated now, bellies up, tiny monuments to neglect.

On the counter sat the **orange** she'd bought three mornings ago, its skin beginning to dimple in the unmoving air. She remembered squeezing it for their Sunday mimosas, the ritual that had anchored them through job losses and her mother's decline. Now the juice would taste like nothing. She peeled it anyway, letting the spray hit her eyes.

Her phone buzzed against the table. Work email: another crisis requiring her urgent attention, as if the world hadn't noticed her life had crumbled. She pressed her **palm** against the warm glass, feeling the vibration of a time that kept moving forward while hers stood frozen in this kitchen, dividing ten years into his and hers, keep and discard, as if any of it could really be sorted.

She wrote down: Bed. Sold.

The **dog**—no, they'd never had a dog. That was the life they'd talked about in whispers after too much wine, the house with the fenced yard, the future they'd planned but never built. The dog existed only in conversations from better years, a ghost alongside the ghosts of children they'd never have, whole lives that lived and died in the space between them.

Marlena looked at the half-empty apartment, at the boxes marked HIS and HERS and neither.

She crossed out nothing. Let David have the cat and the dead fish. She'd keep the orange and the haunting of what might have been.

Some inventories, she decided, you never finish completing.