The Taxidermy of Regret

The vitamin D deficiency explained everything—the lethargy, the crumbling mood, the way Sarah's voice had started sounding like a radio broadcast from another room. She'd left the supplements on the counter in a bright orange bottle, labeled with her careful handwriting: "Morning, with food." That was six months ago, before she walked out with nothing but a suitcase and that goddamned fox fur hat.

Now it's November, and David stands in their bedroom—his bedroom—surrounded by half-empty boxes. The taxidermy bear head mounted above the dresser watches him with glass eyes. Sarah had hated that bear. "It's depressing," she'd say, "like a dead relative no one has the heart to bury." But it had been his grandfather's, taken down in '67, and David had kept it out of some misplaced sense of inheritance.

He swallows a vitamin pill without water. The taste is chalky and bitter.

Outside, the city groans under the weight of early snow. David finds himself thinking about her laugh—that sharp, sudden bark that could cut through his worst moods. He thinks about the way she'd steal his hoodies, the smell of her shampoo in his sheets, the morning she made coffee and said, "I don't think you're happy, David. I don't think either of us is."

The bear continues its frozen vigil. What had she called it? A monument to something that used to be alive. Now it's just taxidermy—preserving the form while everything that mattered rots away inside.

He remembers buying the hat for her birthday, three years ago. They'd been in Aspen, or maybe it was Telluride. Someplace cold. Someplace where they'd pretended to be people who could afford expensive things. "A real fox fur," the shopkeeper had said, and Sarah had run her fingers through the rust-colored pelt with something like hunger. Now she wears it in David's imagination, wrapped around some other man's shoulders.

The vitamin bottle is nearly empty. He should buy more. He should call her. He should take down the bear.

David reaches up, touches the bear's glass eye. It's smooth and cold. He pulls the taxidermy from the wall, carries it downstairs, and sets it by the door. Tomorrow he'll donate it. Or throw it away. Or maybe leave it on the curb with a sign that says FREE.

For now, he opens another vitamin. Washes it down with whiskey. The bear watches from the floor, and David watches the snow fall, and somewhere, somewhere, Sarah is alive and laughing in her fox hat, and that will have to be enough.