The Green Things We Keep

The cat hadn't moved from his spot on the windowsill for three days. Barnaby was old, seventeen years of patient judgment and intermittent affection, and I suspected this was the end. I moved through my apartment like a zombie, performing the rituals of caretaking—fresh water, canned food, gentle strokes behind the ears—though he barely acknowledged me. The grief hadn't hit yet. I was hollowed out, walking through rooms that still held Arthur's ghost in every object: his coffee mug on the counter, his reading glasses beside the bed, the way morning light caught dust motes in the kitchen where he'd stood making us breakfast.

Arthur had died six weeks ago. The spinach in the crisper drawer had gone slimy twice since then; I kept buying more, some delusional hope that if I filled the refrigerator with the things he loved to cook, he might somehow return to sauté them with garlic and lemon. We'd met at a coworking space—two freelancers sharing a table—and the spinach story had been our first real conversation. I'd been eating a salad for lunch every day, and he'd finally asked, with genuine curiosity, what I actually liked about it. I'd admitted I didn't. He'd laughed, and the next day he brought me a warm spinach feta pastry from the Greek bakery down the street. That was it. That was everything.

Now I ate toast over the sink, alone.

Barnaby shifted on the windowsill, let out a small, dissatisfied mrrp. I sat beside him, and he allowed me to scratch his chin. Some nights I dreamed Arthur was still alive, and the mornings after were the worst—a second death, fresh and cruel. Other nights I dreamed nothing, and those were almost worse. I was starting to understand how people became zombies, how the weight of absence could make you crave your own annihilation.

But the cat lifted his head and regarded me with what might have been recognition. He stood, stretched, and butted his forehead against my hand. The spinach in the drawer could wait. The grief would come, or it wouldn't. For now, there was this: two survivors, learning to live in a world that had irrevocably changed.