Supplements and Shadows

Mark counted them every morning: the vitamin D capsule shaped like a tear, the B-complex that stained his tongue yellow, the fish oil that burped up ocean smells all day. At forty-seven, he'd become a connoisseur of aging anxiety.

"Are you coming?" Elena stood in the doorway, padel racket on her shoulder. She'd taken up the sport three months ago, finding something in the rhythmic *thwack* of ball against glass that their marriage had lost.

"Can't. Meeting." It wasn't true. They both knew it wasn't true.

Barnaby, their tabby, wound around Mark's ankles. The cat had been vomiting lately, small puddles of bile on the hardwood that Mark cleaned at 3 AM while Elena slept. Or pretended to.

"The vet said—" Elena started.

"I know what the vet said."

She left without another word. Mark heard the garage door, then silence.

He found Barnaby hours later, beneath the bed where they'd once found their daughter's hamster after it escaped, mummified in the dark. The cat was warm but still, breathing in shallow gasps. Mark gathered the fifteen-pound weight of him, fur matted with something that smelled wrong.

The emergency clinic was fluorescent bright. A young vet with hands that shook slightly palpated Barnaby's abdomen.

"Mass on the liver," she said, not meeting Mark's eyes. "Could give him weeks. Could give him months."

"What do you recommend?"

She looked up then. "Quality over quantity. Always."

Mark walked out with steroids and painkillers and a cat who didn't care about his prayers. At home, he dumped his vitamins into the trash. All those rituals of control, useless.

Elena came home to find them on the floor, Mark and the dying cat, sharing the same patch of sunlight. She put down her racket and lay beside them. Barnaby purred, a broken, rattling sound.

"I'm sorry," Mark said. "About everything."

She rested her head on his shoulder. For the first time in months, the silence between them felt like something they could breathe inside.