The Bull at the Breakfast Table

She stood at the kitchen counter, crushing the **vitamin** C tablets into a fine powder. David had always accused her of being obsessive about health, as if swallowing supplements could somehow inoculate their marriage against the slow decay that had been eating away at it for three years.

Outside, rain hammered against the windows, relentless as the **water** that had already flooded the basement twice this spring. The weatherman had called it a once-in-a-century storm, but then, they said that about everything now. Climate collapse, midlife crises, the sudden realization that the life you'd built was nothing like the one you'd ordered from the catalogue.

Their **cat**, Barnaby, wound around her ankles, purring with his customary disregard for human suffering. He was the only one in the house who didn't seem to notice that everything was falling apart. She'd found David's phone on the counter last night, unlocked, open to a message thread that made her stomach feel like it had been replaced with cold stone. Not an affair, but something worse—architectural plans for a house in Portland. Single-story. Open concept. A life without stairs, without her, without the wheelchair he'd sworn he didn't mind helping her into after the accident.

She dumped the spinach into a bowl, watching the leaves release tiny droplets from the colander. Fresh greens, she'd told him yesterday. We need to eat more fresh greens. He'd nodded, his eyes already somewhere else, already in that house in Portland with hardwood floors and no memories of who they used to be.

What she needed to say was simple. What she needed to do was clear. But she was standing here, taking vitamins she didn't believe in, making lunch for a man who had already left in every way that mattered, feeding a cat who would forget her within a week of her absence.

The **bull** in the room wasn't the animal—it was the lies they'd both been telling themselves. The pretense that they could just eat more spinach, take more vitamins, drink more water, and somehow the rot would reverse itself. Some things, once broken, stayed broken. Some departures happened years before the physical body left the room.

She dropped the vitamin powder into the trash. Let him find his own pills in Portland.