Supplements and Sabotage

Maya stared at the amber plastic bottle. Vitamin D3, 5000 IU. The doctor said her levels were catastrophically low, which explained the fatigue, the brain fog, the way she'd been moving through her life like a ghost haunting her own body. At thirty-four, she shouldn't feel this ancient.

Her cat, Barnaby, wound around her ankles, purring like a small engine. He was the only living thing in this apartment that still touched her with enthusiasm. Since Lucas left—packed his boxes in that terrifyingly efficient way men have when they've been mentally checked out for months—she'd been subsisting on takeout and wine and the occasional papaya, eaten standing up over the sink like some feral creature.

She caught movement outside the kitchen window. A fox, sleek and improbable in this Brooklyn backyard, stood frozen among the overgrown tomato plants Lucas had planted with such optimism last spring. The fox met her gaze through the glass, amber eyes assessing her. It looked like it knew things.

"You too?" Maya whispered. "Everyone leaves."

The fox vanished into the alley.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Lucas: *Left my vitamins in the medicine cabinet. Can you mail them?*

The audacity. The absolute casual cruelty of it. He'd moved in with Sarah—the architectural firm's "fox," everyone called her, sharp and calculating and devastatingly composed—three weeks ago. And now he wanted her to perform this domestic errand, this wifely chore, as if their marriage hadn't dissolved into paperwork and silence.

Maya opened the medicine cabinet. There they were, his expensive supplements lined up like little soldiers. She popped open his Vitamin C bottle, poured the contents into the toilet, and flushed.

Barnaby meowed, indignant about the noise.

"Sorry," she said. "I'm done being nice."

She sliced into the papaya on the counter, its bright orange flesh shocking against the gray morning. It was perfectly ripe. She ate it with her hands, juice running down her wrists, and thought about foxes and vitamins and all the ways you could starve while still eating every day.

Tomorrow she'd buy new vitamins. She'd call a landscaper about the garden. She'd adopt a second cat so Barnaby wouldn't be lonely. But right now, standing in her kitchen with papaya sticky on her hands, she finally felt something like hunger again.