The Soft Animal Bodies

The apartment felt too large without him, which was ridiculous because it was only eight hundred square feet. But Maria stood in the kitchen on a Tuesday morning, holding the dog's leash in one hand and the cat carrier in the other, and the space yawned.

"This is stupid," she said aloud. The dog—Buster, a golden retriever mix who'd been Lucas's idea of a hiking companion—tilted his head. Inside the carrier, Cleo made a sound like a dying engine.

Lucas had left three weeks ago. Moved in with that woman from his office, the one with the smooth voice and the master's degree in something administrative. He'd taken his clothes, his coffee maker, his half of the bookshelf. He hadn't taken the pets. Hadn't even asked about them. Just left them there like furniture he'd lost interest in.

Maria had been doing fine, really. She'd been swimming at the YMCA every morning before work, slicing through the water until her arms burned and her thoughts quieted. Something about the rhythm of breathing and pulling and gliding made the absence bearable. In the water, she was just a body in motion, not someone whose husband had found a better model.

The cable bill sat on the counter. She'd meant to cancel it—Lucas had been the one who watched sports, who needed five hundred channels—but somehow she hadn't. Something about cutting services felt like admitting defeat. Like the apartment was already empty enough.

She set down the leash and carrier and called her sister. "Can you take them for a few days?"

"Again? Maria, you can't keep—"

"I know. I just need some time. There's something I have to do."

"What?" Her sister's voice softened. "Maria, are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I'm great. I'm just going to stay with a friend." A lie. She had no friend. She had a plan.

After she dropped off the animals, she came home and filled the bathtub. Not with water, though that would come later. First she sat on the edge and called the cable company to cancel everything. Then she called her landlord to say she was breaking the lease. Then she sat with her phone in her hand and thought about calling Lucas, about telling him everything she'd been holding back for seven years, but she didn't.

The water was still running when it began to spill over the tub's edge. She watched it pool on the tile, creeping toward the baseboard, and for the first time since he'd left, she didn't feel like she was swimming against the current. She was just letting it carry her.

"The cat and dog," she said, and began to laugh. It started small and then built until she was crying, really crying, the ugly kind that made your chest heave. She'd abandoned her pets to grieve in a flooding bathroom. She was thirty-four years old and completely unraveling.

And it was fine. It was actually fine. The water could be mopped. The sister would bring the animals back in a few days. The apartment could be cleaned. She could find a smaller place, a better place. She could learn to live alone, which she'd never really done, not properly.

Maria turned off the tap and sat in her wet clothes on the bathroom floor, and for the first time in years, she didn't feel like she was waiting for something to happen. She was just there, in the mess she'd made, and that was enough.