Static

The storm outside matched the one in Maya's chest as she opened the medicine cabinet. Rows of vitamin bottles—D3, B-complex, prenatal, CoQ10—stared back like tiny judges of her biological clock. Thirty-eight years old and still trying, still hoping, still bleeding every month with crushing regularity.

Thunder rattled the window frame. In the bathroom mirror, she studied the strands of hair that had been falling out for months. Stress, the doctor said. The fertility treatments. The antidepressants. A perfect pharmaceutical cocktail that had transformed her thick, dark waves into something fragile and thinning.

"You taking those?" Richard's voice carried from the bedroom. He sounded tired. They were both so tired.

"Every single one," she called back, though she hadn't taken the prenatal today. Couldn't bring herself to swallow another promise that might turn out to be a lie.

Lightning illuminated the bathroom in brilliant white, and for a second, Maya saw herself as Richard must see her: thinner, brittle, desperate. The woman who used to laugh with her whole body, who used to have wild hair she didn't obsessively count in the shower drain.

She opened the drawer and found the scissors she'd hidden there weeks ago. Another flash of lightning—closer this time. The storm was directly overhead now, fierce and indifferent, the way nature should be.

Richard appeared in the doorway. "Maya? Everything okay?"

She met his eyes in the mirror. "No. But it will be."

"What are you—"

The first strand fell to the linoleum floor. Then another. The sound of cutting was sharp and final, cutting through years of trying to become someone else, someone motherly and soft and acceptable.

"Maya, stop."

She kept cutting. Hair rained down like black snow. When she finished, she looked like a stranger—sharp angles exposed, eyes older somehow, clearer.

"We can stop trying," she said, and the words tasted like iron and release. "I can't do this anymore. The vitamins, the shots, the waiting. I can't."

Richard's shoulders dropped. He came closer, reached to touch the short, jagged strands near her temple. "You're beautiful," he said, but his voice cracked on the word, and she knew he heard it too—the sound of something ending.

Outside, the storm broke. Rain lashed the window.

"We had three good years before all this," she said. "Before we forgot how to be us."

He nodded, once. Then he was crying, pulling her close, and she held him with her strange new hands that felt lighter, freer. The vitamins stood in their regimented rows, silent and obsolete, as the storm passed and left them standing in the fluorescent quiet of a bathroom that smelled of rain and endings and something that might, eventually, be a beginning.