The Bear in the Room

The iphone illuminated Maya's face at 3:14 AM, its blue glow casting shadows under eyes that hadn't slept since she found the texts. His texts. Three weeks of silence, then an explosion of words: *I miss you. I made a mistake. Can we talk?*

Maya tossed the phone onto the nightstand. It landed with a soft thud beside the bottle of prenatal vitamins she'd forgotten to throw away. The irony wasn't lost on her — she'd spent two years trying to conceive, all while he was concealing affairs.

Her cat, Barnaby, wound around her ankles, purring loudly. The only male in her life who hadn't lied to her recently, though that might have been because he was surgically incapable of reproduction.

"You hungry too?" Maya whispered. She padded to the kitchen, bare feet cold on the hardwood. The suburban house was silent around her, the silence of a marriage that had been dead longer than she'd admitted.

In the den, her father's hunting trophy loomed over the leather sofa. A massive grizzly bear, head mounted, glass eyes seeming to follow her. She'd hated it since childhood — a relic of her father's failed masculinity, his desperate attempts to prove something through conquest and violence. The bear had always smelled faintly of dust and something sweeter, something that made her stomach turn.

Now she knew that scent: decay.

"You and me both," she told the bear. "Both stuck somewhere we don't belong."

Her iphone buzzed again. Another missed call. She blocked him tomorrow. She always said that.

Maya opened the vitamin bottle, shook three pills into her palm. Folic acid. Iron. Something else she couldn't pronounce. She'd taken them religiously every morning for eighteen months, creating life that never came, while her husband created new lives elsewhere.

The pills went down the sink, swirling away like dissolved dreams.

Barnaby meowed.

"Yeah," Maya said. "Me too."

She looked up at the bear, at its glass eyes and forever-silent snarl. For thirty-five years, it had watched this house, this family, all the things that had rotted from the inside out while everyone pretended everything was fine.

"I'm leaving tomorrow," she told it. "Just me and Barnaby. Maybe Big Bear. Maybe just west."

The bear said nothing, but somehow, its glass eyes seemed less judgmental than they'd been her entire life.

Her iphone lit up one more time. She didn't look.

Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tomorrow she'd block him, pack the car, and drive until the bear in the room was just a bad memory.