Sunday Vitamins

The vitamin C bottle stood empty on the counter, a small monument to three months of failed attempts to feel something other than numb. Marie had been taking them religiously, hoping they might spark some dormant immune response to the spreading cancer of their marriage.

She found him in the backyard, palm pressed against the rough bark of the old oak tree, as if he could somehow absorb its stubborn vitality through osmosis. Their dog, Buster—a creature of indiscriminate loyalty—lay curled at his feet, the only living thing that still seemed to recognize the man she'd married twelve years ago.

"You're missing it," David said, not turning around. "The eclipse starts in ten minutes."

"I'm not watching it on cable," she said, though they both knew she would. She always did. Watched everything through screens now. Their life, their arguments, their increasingly infrequent intimacy—all mediated by some intermediate device.

He turned then, and she saw it again: that hollowed-out look, that zombie-eyed stare he'd developed since the layoff. The man who used to make her laugh until wine came out her nose had been replaced by this slow-moving thing that shuffled between rooms and muttered about solar flares and economic collapse.

"The vit—" she started, then stopped. The vitamins weren't working. Nothing was. But still she persisted, buying supplements, reading articles about dopamine and circadian rhythms, as if the answer to their rotting marriage could be found in some pill or podcast.

David's palm left the tree. He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time in months. "Remember when we said we'd never become this? Those people who barely speak, who live like roommates who happen to share a bed?"

"I remember," she said. "I remember everything."

"Then why are we still doing it?"

Buster lifted his head, sensing something. Marie felt something too—that same old familiar fear, sharp and sudden as a cut, that some answers, once spoken, can never be unheard.