The Last Vitamin

She swallowed the vitamin with lukewarm coffee, the pill clicking against her teeth. Another day, another supplement, another attempt to feel something that wasn't this hollow ache spreading through her chest like metastatic silence.

The cabin was her mother's idea—a marriage retreat, she'd called it. But the retreat had turned into a siege. Mark moved through the rooms like a zombie, his eyes glazed with the gray film of unresolved grievances and the peculiar exhaustion of two people who had said everything they meant and nothing that mattered.

"I'm going for a swim," she announced, though she wasn't asking permission.

The lake was freezing, the kind of cold that made your skin tighten and your breath catch in your throat. She swam until her arms burned, until the cold replaced the numbness, until she couldn't feel anything else. When she emerged, dripping and shivering on the wooden dock, she saw it—a fox, its coat impossibly bright against the muted grays of the forest. It watched her with something like intelligence, or maybe she was projecting, desperate for any witness that wasn't Mark.

That evening, as they sat in the cabin's amber light, neither speaking nor comfortable in the silence, a bear lumbered past the window. Massive and indifferent, it moved through their periphery like a dark omen. Mark didn't look up from his phone.

"Did you see it?" she asked.

"See what?"

"The bear."

He shrugged. The gesture contained volumes—years of missed moments, of lives lived in parallel but never intersecting. She thought about the fox watching her from the shore, the bear moving through the dark as if they didn't exist. Perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps they had become ghosts to each other.

She took another vitamin from the bottle. Her hands shook slightly.

"Mark?"

"Hmm?"

"I think the zombies won."

He finally looked up, his eyes flickering with something that might have been recognition or might have been the light catching the glassiness there. "What?"

"Nothing," she said, and swallowed the pill dry. "Just thinking about tomorrow."