The Color of Goodbye

Mira had been running for forty-five minutes when the dog appeared—a stray, mangy thing with one ear that refused to stand. It followed her for three blocks before she stopped, hands on knees, chest heaving in the predawn gray.

"Go on," she wheezed. The dog sat.

Three weeks after David left, Mira had started running at 4 AM. The city was different then—soft, yielding, like the world hadn't yet decided what shape to take. She liked the anonymity of darkness, the way her body's protests drowned out everything else.

The dog's fur was matted with burrs. Its eyes were old and knowing.

"Fine," Mira said. "But I'm not a dog person."

They ran together the next morning. And the next. She named him Barnaby because it felt dignified enough for a creature who'd seen some things.

The morning she found the orange in David's old coat pocket—the one she'd kept, humiliatingly, in the back of her closet—Mira almost didn't go running. It had rotted there, soft and collapsing, staining the wool with something that looked like rust. Like the shape of things unfinished.

She threw the coat away. She cried for exactly three minutes. Then she laced up her shoes.

Barnaby was waiting at the corner. They ran their route, past the bakery with its warm yeast smell, past the park where mothers already pushed strollers in circles, past the orange grove that didn't exist anymore—replaced by condos, though Mira still imagined she could smell citrus some mornings, especially when the fog rolled in.

They ran until Mira's legs burned. They ran until she couldn't feel anything else.

"Stupid," she said, bent over, gasping. Barnaby nudged her hand with a wet nose.

Behind them, the sun was coming up—burning orange, relentless and indifferent. The kind of orange that made you believe in starting over, even when you didn't want to. Even when starting over felt like betraying everything you'd lost.

Mira straightened up. Her heart hammered against her ribs.

"Okay," she said to the dog. "Okay."

They turned toward home.