The Last Prescription

The apartment smelled of lavender and decay. Maya stood in her mother's bathroom, surrounded by the detritus of a life meticulously maintained toward the end. On the counter, a rainbow of vitamin bottles stood like sentinels—D3 for bones, B12 for energy, biotin for the hair that had thinned anyway. Her mother had believed in the power of pills, in the possibility that the right combination could delay the inevitable.

Barnaby, her mother's elderly golden retriever, pressed his warm flank against Maya's leg. He'd been waiting by the door for three days, not understanding why Eleanor wasn't coming home. The dog's once-glossy coat was dull now, his muzzle gray. He looked at Maya with eyes that seemed to hold all the grief she couldn't articulate.

"You're hungry, aren't you?" Maya whispered, her voice cracking. She filled his bowl but he didn't eat.

She picked up her mother's hairbrush, still tangled with silver strands. Eleanor had been proud of her hair even as cancer stole everything else. "Keep it looking nice," she'd told the hospice nurse, "in case someone visits." No one had. Maya had been too busy with her promotion, her divorce proceedings, her carefully curated life in the city.

The vitamins. The dog. The hair. All the things her mother had nurtured, believing they mattered. Maya swept the bottles into the trash—calcium, iron, folic acid, hope. Then she called the vet to schedule Barnaby's euthanasia. Then she cut her own hair, jagged and uneven in the mirror, watching the dark locks fall like dead leaves.

"There," she said to the empty room. "Now we're all letting go."