The Taxidermy of Goodbye

Elise hadn't stepped foot in the lake house since David's funeral three years ago. The cable ferry swayed beneath her tires, a mechanical hesitation that matched her own. She parked where they used to, beside the rotting dock where he'd taught her to skip stones, where the water held everything.

Inside, the air smelled of pine and abandonment. His favorite hat—a crushed felt thing that had made him look like a detective from a noir film—still hung on the hook by the door. She touched it, fingers trembling, and didn't cry. She was done with crying.

Then she saw it.

The bear.

David had bought it at some estate sale during their first year together, convinced it would be charming. It wasn't. The taxidermy grizzly stood frozen in the corner of the living room, glass eyes tracking her movement, mouth open in a perpetual roar that looked more surprised than ferocious. They'd fought about it constantly. He'd called it a statement piece. She'd called it a harbinger.

"It's basically art," he'd said, pouring them both another glass of wine.

"It's basically cursed," she'd countered.

Now the bear stood guard over dust and memory, and Elise felt something crack open in her chest. Not grief—something older, more complicated.

She found the orange peels in the kitchen garbage, dried and curled like ancient scrolls. Funny how she remembered that detail: how he'd eat oranges at the counter, peel flying, juice dripping down his chin, laughing at her OCD about cleanup. Funny how the smallest things became monuments.

Her phone buzzed. A friend, checking in. "You okay over there?"

Elise typed back: "I think I hated him sometimes."

The response came instantly: "Of course you did. That's part of it."

She sat on the floor between the bear and the hat, eating an orange she'd brought, letting the juice stick her fingers together. The cable ferry would return in two hours. She could leave, or she could stay another night. David was gone. The bear remained. The hat waited. And somewhere beneath all the loss, something like love moved through her—patient as water, certain as gravity, bearing the weight of everything she couldn't say.