The Static Between Us

The cat hadn't eaten in three days. Neither had I, really—not since the funeral. The cable company kept sending automated bills to my sister's inbox, and I kept staring at them through tear-swollen eyes, letting them pile up like funeral wreaths in a digital cemetery.

My mother's condominium was a pyramid of grief: grief on the first floor in the form of unopened sympathy cards, grief on the second in her preserved closet of clothes that still smelled like her perfume and hospital visits, grief on the third floor where I slept in her bed because the couch hurt my back and I didn't want to be alone anyway.

I felt like a zombie moving through these rooms—someone animated by impulse alone, eating when I remembered to, sleeping when exhaustion finally dragged me down. The corporate ladder I'd spent ten years climbing now seemed like another kind of pyramid scheme, one where you traded your soul for a corner office and still ended up here anyway.

The cat wound around my legs as I slumped on the sofa, flipping through channels that blurred together. I stopped on a documentary about mummies. Something about ancient Egyptians and their elaborate preparations for the afterlife—canopic jars and sacred oils, spells carved into gold.

"They believed," the narrator said, "that death was not an ending but a transformation."

I looked at the cat, who was now staring at me with those unnerving yellow eyes, and something cracked open inside me. Not healed, exactly. But opened.

The cable box hummed its constant electronic prayer to the void. I reached for the phone and finally called my sister back.

"I can't do this alone," I said, and it was the first true thing I'd said in weeks.

The cat purred against my leg. Somewhere in the pyramid of boxes behind me, something shifted. I fed the cat. Then I fed myself. Then I started sorting through the mail, one letter at a time.