The Supplements We Swallow

Marcus found the cat on the fire escape of his ex-wife's apartment building at 2 AM, watching him with predatory yellow eyes. He was there to retrieve his vitamin supplements—the expensive ones Elena claimed she'd thrown out but probably kept just to spite him. Their marriage had dissolved like those same pills in water: slowly, then all at once, leaving a bitter film neither could scrub clean.

He shouldn't have come. That was the first thought. The second was that the cat looked well-fed, which meant someone was caring for it, which meant the neighborhood wasn't as desolate as his mother kept claiming in those guilt-inducing Sunday calls.

"You're going to climb up there for a bottle of glorified placebos?" Jordan had asked earlier that evening, sprawled across Marcus's couch like she owned the space between them. "That's bullshit, Marc. You don't need them."

She was twenty-six, with the kind of certainty that made Marcus feel ancient at thirty-eight. Jordan was everything Elena wasn't: unfiltered, brutally honest, currently sleeping with her boss and telling Marcus about it over wine like it was a funny anecdote instead of a cry for something resembling help.

"They help," Marcus had said, though he couldn't remember the last time he'd felt helped by anything.

"Bullshit," Jordan said again. "You're just taking them because your therapist suggested you establish a routine. You could establish a routine by feeding actual strays. By calling your brother back. By doing literally anything that connects you to the world instead of these little capsules of control."

Now the cat meowed, a sound like a question. Marcus realized he was gripping the bottle of vitamins so hard his knuckles had gone white. He could leave them here. Let Elena throw them out. Let Jordan be right for once, even though being right didn't make her less lost, just louder about it.

He set the bottle on the fire escape railing instead. The cat approached, sniffed, and looked at him with something dangerously close to judgment.

"Fine," Marcus whispered. "You're right. It's just." He gestured vaguely at everything.

The cat ate something invisible—maybe a bug, maybe his excuse—and then turned away, tail flicking with supreme indifference. Marcus walked back to his car feeling lighter, unencumbered by the weight of maintaining himself through synthetic means. In the morning, he'd call Jordan and suggest they feed the actual strays. In the morning, he'd stop by his brother's. In the morning, he'd begin something real.