The Color of Goodbye

The orange plastic prescription bottle sat on her nightstand for three weeks after the funeral. Emma had started running at dawn partly to exhaust herself, partly to escape the silent accusation of that container. Her feet hit the pavement in a rhythm that matched the mantra in her head: one more day, one more mile, one more breath without him.

Then she found the dog.

It was chained to a porch railing down the street from her new apartment, a skeletal thing with ribs visible through matted fur. The owners left it outside in all weather, she realized with a sickening drop in her stomach. Emma began taking her running route past that house, leaving portions of her own breakfast—half a bagel, pieces of scrambled eggs—near the fence.

"You're a sociopath," her sister told her over drinks that weekend. "You're literally running away from grief and stealing someone's dog emotionally."

"I'm not stealing anything," Emma said, though she'd already Googled how to report animal neglect anonymously.

The morning she finally called animal control, Emma wore her ex-husband's orange running shirt—the one he'd left behind because it was too tight now. She ran past the house and the dog was gone. A FOR SALE sign had appeared in the yard two days earlier. Relief and shame warred in her chest as she completed her loop, sweat stinging her eyes.

Three weeks later, she got the call. The dog hadn't been adopted; could she come meet him? Emma stood outside the shelter in the same orange shirt, now washed threadbare and soft.

"Barnaby," the volunteer said, reading from the clipboard. "Previous owners said he wouldn't hunt. Useless."

The dog pressed his bony frame against her leg and looked up with eyes that had seen too much. Emma scratched behind his ears and felt something crack open inside her chest.

"That's okay," she said. "I'm not much for hunting either."

They run together now. Sometimes she still wakes at dawn and runs alone, needing the solitude, but Barnaby waits on the doormat, his tail thumping a steady rhythm against the floor. The orange bottle is gone, recycled months ago. In its place sits a ceramic bowl, and sometimes, when Emma's feet hit the pavement and her lungs burn with effort, she thinks she can finally hear herself think.

The past doesn't disappear. It just becomes something you run with instead of from.