The Last Campfire

The lightning cracked white across the sky, illuminating the RV parked beside us like a confession. Matt's face glowed pale in the flash, and I saw it then—how we'd become something else, something neither of us recognized.

"Your hair," he said, reaching but not touching. "You look different."

I hadn't cut it since the miscarriage. Twelve months of silence, my body growing stranger to me by the day. I'd become a zombie in my own life, sleepwalking through work dinners and shower crying sessions, my phone pinging with notifications I couldn't bring myself to answer.

My iPhone lay on the picnic table between us, dark as a gravestone. It held everything: the unanswered texts from my mother, the dating app I'd downloaded on impulse, the photos of Matt from before—the ones where he still looked at me like I was something worth seeing.

The ranger had warned us about bears when we checked in. BLACK BEAR ACTIVITY IN AREA. SECURE ALL FOOD. I'd laughed. What did I care about bears when my marriage was already tearing itself apart?

Then I heard it—the heavy rustle, the snap of a branch. A shadow moving between the trees, massive and deliberate. Matt scrambled to his feet, grabbing the flashlight, but I stayed where I was. Something in me had broken open. Some part of me wanted to see what would happen if I stopped running—from the grief, from the disappointment, from the careful life I'd built that now felt like a cage.

"Get back," Matt whispered, his voice tight. "Sarah."

The bear emerged from darkness, shaggy and calm, eyes fixed on the cooler behind me. It moved like something that knew exactly what it wanted, had always known. I watched it approach and felt something shift in my chest—something like recognition.

I didn't move. I didn't reach for Matt's hand. I just watched the bear take our dinner, one container at a time, while lightning split the sky again and again, turning the night into a strobe photograph of everything I was about to lose.