The Taxidermy of Letting Go

The bear stood in the corner of Marcus's study, glass eyes fixed on nothing. Taxidermy, he'd called it when he invited me over—preservation, a final act of care. I hadn't seen my former friend in three years, not since the night he told me he was marrying someone else while still wearing the hat I'd given him for his thirtieth birthday. The same wool hat now rested on the bear's head, jaunty and wrong.

"She couldn't bear to part with him," Marcus said, pouring whiskey with hands that trembled just slightly. "The cat, I mean. Not the bear. The bear's been here since his father's hunting days."

I thought of Sarah—her name still caught in my throat sometimes—and the Persian cat she'd carried everywhere like a living accessory. The cat that had scratched me the first time I visited their apartment, drawing blood while Marcus laughed and said, He's just protective.

"Where is she now?" I asked, though I wasn't sure if I meant the cat or his wife.

"Gone," Marcus said. "Both of them, eventually. The goldfish too, if you can believe it. One day Sarah was here, the next she wasn't. Left a note about needing to find herself. The cat ran off three weeks later. And the goldfish—" he gestured to an empty bowl on the shelf, "—just gave up. Stopped swimming, I suppose."

I wanted to ask him if he'd fought for her. If he'd searched. If he'd loved her the way I'd once loved him, in that aching impossible year before we became just friends again. Instead I watched dust motes dance in the late afternoon light, remembered how goldfish only grow to the size of their containers, how Sarah had seemed smaller every time I saw her, how Marcus's study was filled with dead things he couldn't let go of.

"You should come back more often," he said, and I knew he meant it.

"Maybe," I said, already knowing I wouldn't. Outside, the world was moving forward. Inside, nothing would ever change.