The Lightning in Our Veins

Marie sorted the supplements on her kitchen counter—vitamin D for the winter darkness, B-complex for the fraying nerves, magnesium for the sleep that wouldn't come. Three years with David, and she'd become a woman who organized her life into daily pill organizers.

Outside, lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the baseball glove David had left on the porch. He'd played college ball, back when his shoulders were broad and his future seemed as certain as the arc of a home run. Now he just watched games on television, drinking until the statistics blurred.

Their cat, Pancake, wound between Marie's ankles, purring like a small engine of unconditional love. Animals didn't care about deferred promotions or mortgages that felt like weights around your neck. They just wanted warmth and food and the occasional chin scratch.

"You have to bear this season out," David had said last night, his words slurring slightly. "The market will turn."

But Marie was thirty-four, and she'd been bearing things for a decade. Student loans, his mother's decline, the promotion that always went to someone louder, someone more willing to sacrifice sleep at the altar of quarterly goals.

The lightning struck closer now. She remembered her father saying lightning never hit the same place twice—until it did, in the form of her second divorce.

Marie looked at the vitamin bottles. The small comforts. The ways we convince ourselves that if we just optimize the right variables, we can outrun entropy.

She swept the pills into the trash. Pancake meowed, startled.

David came home at midnight, smelling of cheap beer and other people's optimism. He found her sitting in the dark, watching the lightning flicker across the sky like a heartbeat.

"You're still up," he said, not really asking.

"I'm done bearing this," Marie replied, and for the first time in three years, her voice sounded like her own.