The Bear in the Spinach Aisle

The cat had been howling for three hours when David's iPhone lit up with her text: "I'm not coming back."

He stood in the grocery store at midnight, clutching a bag of organic spinach like it might save him. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting everything in a sickly yellow glow. He'd come here because he couldn't bear the apartment anymore—couldn't bear the silence where Maya used to hum while cooking, couldn't bear the cat's accusing yellow eyes following him from room to room.

The spinach was beginning to wilt in his grip. He remembered how she'd laugh at him for buying organic, saying they'd both be dead before the pesticides could kill them anyway. Her laugh—god, he'd give anything to hear it one more time. Instead, his phone chimed again with a notification from work. A bear attack in Alaska, three dead. The world kept ending, over and over.

"You're blocking the spinach," an old woman said.

David stepped aside, apologizing. He caught his reflection in the freezer door—hollow-cheeked, unshaven, looking like the bear from the news article, something wild and broken that needed to be put down.

The cat, Maya's cat, was probably scratching at the door again. She'd left the cat, just like she'd left everything else she couldn't carry. David had never liked the damn thing, but now it was the only living creature that remembered her name.

His thumb hovered over her contact. One word: please.

Instead, he watched the video of the bear attack. The creature moved with such terrible purpose, destroying everything in its path. David understood that kind of grief—the way it tore through you, leaving wreckage in its wake.

He put the spinach back on the shelf. He wasn't hungry anyway. The cat could wait one more night. Everything could wait.

Outside, the parking lot was empty. David sat in his car and watched the notification light on his iPhone pulse in the darkness, a small, steady heartbeat refusing to die.