The Last Green Thing

David stood at the kitchen counter, his hands stained dark from the spinach he'd been chopping for twenty minutes. Sarah sat at the table, motionless, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond his shoulder. She'd been like this for weeks—moving through rooms like a zombie, hollowed out by whatever had taken residence inside her since the miscarriage.

"You need to eat," he said, his voice sounding foreign in the silence.

She didn't respond. He'd been running from this conversation for months, lacing up his shoes at 5 AM and hitting the pavement until his lungs burned, training for a marathon he didn't even want to run. Anything to be out of the house before she woke. Anything to avoid bearing witness to her disappearance.

The faucet dripped. Water pooled in the sink, mirroring the ceiling light. He turned it off sharply.

"Remember that trip to Alaska?" he tried. "When we saw the bear?"

Sarah's gaze shifted,聚焦 on him for the first time all evening. "We were going to name him Bear," she whispered.

The spinach lay forgotten. David crossed the room and knelt beside her chair, pressing his forehead to her knee. He could feel her breathing, shallow and uneven. beneath his touch. He wanted to shake her, to scream, to force some life back into her body. Instead, he stayed there, breathing in the scent of her unwashed hair, the smell of a person who had stopped participating in her own existence.

"I'm still here," he said.

She reached down, her fingers finding his hair. "Are you?"

The question hung between them like smoke. He thought of his morning runs, the way he pushed himself until his vision blurred, the relief he felt when his phone buzzed with work emails. He thought of the spinach wilting on the counter, the way he'd rather chop vegetables indefinitely than sit in this room and feel.

He tilted his head to look at her. Her eyes were wet.

"I'm trying," he said.

"Try harder," she said, and something in her voice cracked open. "Before I forget what alive feels like."

He stood up and pulled her from the chair, and she came willing, her body light and fragile against his. They stood there in the kitchen, holding each other like survivors of a shipwreck, while the spinach turned to slime on the cutting board and the last of the day's light died against the windows.