Stray Hairs

The dog had been dead for three weeks when Elena found the first clump of hair caught in the vacuum cleaner. Black, coarse — unmistakably Buster's. She sank to the floor, the vacuum still humming beside her, and let herself remember.

"You should have come," Marcus said later that night, over takeout neither of them would eat. He'd been her friend through everything: the divorce, her mother's stroke, the long stretch of years when she'd forgotten how to be anything but lonely. "To the memorial. I mean, I know he was just..."

"He wasn't just anything," Elena snapped. Then softer: "You didn't know him like I did."

Marcus's apartment was sterile in that way men lived who'd never made a home with anyone. No pet hair on the cushions. No scratched doorframes. Elena had started finding reasons to stop by after work. Some indefinable ache she needed to press against, see if it would bruise or heal.

The third time, she saw it: a single black hair clinging to Marcus's pristine cream sweater. Her breath caught. Impossible.

"Marcus," she said, her voice strange even to herself. "Where were you three weeks ago? The night Buster..."

He didn't answer. His eyes slid away from hers, toward the window where the city lights blurred into darkness.

"He was old," Marcus said finally. "Suffering. I know you couldn't—"

"You killed him?"

"I helped him. Like you couldn't bring yourself to do. Like you asked me to, that night you got drunk and cried about his quality of life and how you were too selfish to—"

"I never asked you to—"

"You did. You just don't remember."

Elena stood shaking. The dog hair on Marcus's sweater seemed to expand in her vision, fill the room. Her best friend. The man who'd brought her soup when she was sick, who'd sat with her through her mother's funeral, who'd somehow loved her enough to do the terrible thing she couldn't.

"Get out," she whispered.

He didn't fight. He walked past her, and the last thing she saw was the black hair still clinging to his shoulder, bright and damning as a bruise.

That night, she slept with Buster's bed beside her own. The house felt newly empty. She dreamed of a dog running through tall grass, younger than she'd ever known him, and woke to find hair on her pillow — her own, gray at the temples, falling out in the season of losing everything that had ever loved her back.