The Rotting Season

The cable bill sat on the kitchen counter, third notice, a bright orange flag I'd been ignoring for weeks. Much like everything else in my life since Mara left.

I stood in front of the open refrigerator at 2 AM, the hum of the appliance the only sound in the apartment. The spinach she'd bought three days ago had already turned to slime in the crisper drawer. That was Mara — always buying vegetables with such optimism, such faith in a future version of ourselves who would actually cook together. The version that never materialized.

A bull of a man, my father used to say about his own stubborn streak. I hadn't understood then how inheritance worked. How you could spend your whole life determined not to become someone, only to wake up one morning and realize you're him anyway.

Mara's cat, Barnaby, wound himself around my ankles, meowing for food that wasn't coming. He'd been her companion long before he'd been ours, and now he looked at me with something uncomfortably close to judgment. As if he knew I was the one who'd finally broken something she'd spent three years trying to fix.

I closed the refrigerator door and caught my reflection in the freezer — tired eyes, shoulders slumped, thirty-seven going on sixty. On the cable news playing muted on the TV, some politician was shouting about the economy. I thought about the baseball game we'd gone to last summer, when she'd worn my jersey because she was cold, and I'd felt like I had everything figured out.

The rotting spinach was still sitting there when I opened the fridge again. I could throw it out. I could pay the cable bill. I could feed the cat. Small things. The kind of things that, eventually, added up to a life.

Instead, I just stood there in the yellow light of the refrigerator, letting the cold wash over me, wondering how many more nights I'd spend waiting to start living again.