The Heavy Lifting

Maya sat on the floor of her half-empty apartment, surrounded by boxes that smelled like dust and endings. She held up the bottle of vitamin D supplements—the last thing Richard had left behind, along with his half of the rent and a year of her life. She shook the bottle. Pills rattled like dry bones.

Her cat, Bast, wound through the towers of cardboard, purring loudly, as if the chaos was somehow comforting. At least one of them felt safe.

The coaxial cable snaked across the floorboards like a dead thing, disconnected from the wall where Richard had ripped it out during their last fight—the one about nothing and everything. He'd shouted that she was emotionally withholding, and she'd shouted that he was a child who needed constant validation, and the cable had given up the ghost in a spray of sparks.

Now everything was quiet. Too quiet.

Maya's phone lit up with a text from her mother: "Your father's in the hospital again. Heart." Lightning flashed across her window, illuminating the message in stark, terrible clarity. The storm had been brewing all day, a heavy pressure behind her eyes that she'd mistaken for a headache.

She stood up, knees popping. Her father had always told her she was stubborn as a bear, and maybe he was right. She'd stayed too long in a relationship that had stopped working months ago. She'd avoided phone calls because she didn't want to hear about her parents' aging, their mortality, their inevitable slow-motion departure from her life.

The vitamins in her hand suddenly felt heavy, like stones. She could keep taking them—Richard's vitamins, a daily reminder of what she'd lost—or she could throw them away. She could call her mother back. She could start over, truly start over, in a way that mattered.

Outside, thunder rattled the windowpane. Maya dropped the bottle into the trash. She picked up her phone. Bast meowed, indignant, as if sensing the shift in the room's gravity. Maya dialed, and when her mother answered, she didn't say she was busy. She didn't say she'd call back later. She said, "I'm coming home," and meant it.