The Animals We Carry

The funeral home smelled of lemon polish and old regret. I should have been running here instead of walking, but something kept my feet heavy on the pavement. Maybe it was knowing I'd see her—my oldest friend, the one who'd become a stranger somewhere between college and whatever this was.

She was there in the third row, wearing black like armor. The bull—that's what we'd called her in law school, unstoppable, magnificent, terrifying. She'd trampled through mergers and hearts with equal efficiency. I was the fox back then: smaller, quicker, good at finding exits.

"You came," she said afterward, by the lukewarm coffee station. Not a question.

"He was my brother."

"Our brother," she corrected. The space between us felt vast. We'd shared a bed, once, and a childhood, and now we couldn't share silence.

I thought about the bear—this was the joke we made about Thomas, our deceased brother, who'd hibernated through life, surfacing only to eat and complain about winter. But bears hibernate to survive. Thomas just slept to avoid.

"Are you still seeing that man?" she asked.

"He left. Said I was too quick for him. Too fox-like."

She laughed, and for a second we were girls again, running through the summer grass, before the bull found her horns, before the fox learned to bite, before the bear stopped waking up at all.

"We should get coffee," she said. "Real coffee. Not funeral coffee."

"I'm leaving town tomorrow."

"Always running." She smiled, but her eyes were old. "Some things never change."

I walked out into the gray afternoon and started running, not toward anything, just away from the lemon polish and the woman I used to know and the brother who'd never learned to stay awake for his own life. The pavement was hard under my feet, and for the first time in years, I didn't feel like a fox at all. I felt like something that had never been named, something that was still becoming.