Last Summer's Lightning

The **vitamin** supplements rattled in their plastic coffin as Marie emptied the kitchen drawer. Forty-seven bottles, each promising something she'd lost somewhere between thirty and forty-five: vitality, grace, sleep without pharmaceutical assistance.

She'd met David at the **pool** three summers ago—their complex's kidney-shaped disappointment, its paint peeling like sunburned skin. He'd been reading philosophy, pretending not to notice her red one-piece. She'd pretended not to notice him noticing. The calculation of middle-aged desire.

Now, **running** past their building felt like trespassing on a crime scene. Her shins ached—a persistent, dull complaint that seemed connected to everything and nothing. At forty-three, Marie had learned that pain is just the body's way of filing paperwork.

The storm broke during dinner. **Lightning** fractured the sky, illuminating David across the table, his new girlfriend's hand on his forearm. The gesture was familiar—Marie had occupied that space for two years. Watching it occupied by someone else was like seeing strangers move through your childhood home.

"You look great, Marie," David said, his politeness a carefully constructed weapon. "Really."

She'd made **spinach** salad for herself that night before remembering she was meeting them for dinner. The wilted greens sat in her refrigerator now, chlorophyll ghosts of meals she'd eaten alone lately.

The vitamin D bottle was closest to her hand. She remembered the doctor saying her levels were critically low—that winter in Seattle would do that to anyone. She remembered David buying her the supplements, arriving at her door with a brown paper bag like he was some kind of pharmacist of the heart.

Marie threw them all away. Every bottle.

The next morning, she ran until her lungs burned, past the pool where they'd first kissed, past the building where she'd once had keys. She kept running, the lightning from the previous night still imprinted on her retinas, electric and inevitable.

Some things, she decided, you don't supplement. Some things you just learn to live without.