The Small Deaths

The hat sat on the closet shelf for three months after Marcus died—a black fedora with a crushed brim that smelled faintly of clove cigarettes and the expensive cologne he'd worn on dates. Elena took it down only when the cat began sleeping on it, as if the animal, too, needed to curl inside what remained of him.

She should have thrown it away. Everything else was gone—the clothes donated, the books boxed, the toothbrush tossed. But the hat stayed, perched on its shelf like a dark bird, waiting.

"You're haunting me," she told the cat, a ginger tom she'd named Bastet despite Marcus's insistence that the name was pretentious. Bastet blinked slowly, kneading his paws into the fedora's felt.

At the grocery store, Elena found herself in the produce aisle, staring at a bag of spinach. Marcus had hated cooked spinach—called it swamp grass—but loved the fresh stuff in salads. He'd made this elaborate one with warm bacon vinaigrette the night he told her he was sick. The diagnosis had come the next morning.

Her palm tingled, a phantom sensation where he'd squeezed her hand during that appointment. The doctors had spoken of treatment options and survival rates, but all she'd felt was the pressure of his fingers against hers, a silent language they'd developed over seven years together.

"Ma'am?" A teenager tapped her shoulder. "You're blocking the spinach."

Elena stepped aside, apologized, bought the bag anyway.

That night, she made the salad. The bacon sputtered in the pan, filling the kitchen with smoky richness. She tore the spinach, feeling the cool leaves give under her fingers. When she sat at the table, Bastet jumped onto the chair opposite her—Marcus's chair.

"You're not him," she said. The cat purred, indifferent.

The spinach was bitter. She ate it anyway, each mouthful a small act of defiance against the empty chair, against the hat on the shelf, against the way her palm still opened for a hand that wasn't there.

When she finished, she stood and carried the hat to the trash can. The cat wound around her ankles, mewling. She dropped the hat into the garbage, watched it settle among coffee grounds and eggshells.

She washed her hands. She breathed.

Tomorrow, she would buy the kind of lettuce she actually liked.