The Vitamin for Grief

The fox had been coming to her garden for three weeks, sleek and brazen, a creature that should have been wild but moved with the confidence of something that owned the place. Elena watched it from her kitchen window, vitamin D tablet dissolving on her tongue—her morning ritual, the one thing she could control since David left.

She was forty-two, running a division of the city's largest supplement company, selling hope in gelatin capsules to people who believed that if they just took enough of them, they wouldn't age, wouldn't hurt, wouldn't find themselves alone in a house that suddenly felt too large. The irony wasn't lost on her.

"You need more vitamin B complex," her colleague Sarah had told her that morning, pushing a sample across the conference table. "For stress." Sarah, who was sleeping with their boss. Sarah, who didn't know that Elena had found the text messages on David's phone three months ago.

The fox returned that evening, carrying something in its mouth—a plastic bag, translucent and tearing. Elena stepped onto the porch, orange sunset bleeding across the sky like a wound. The fox dropped the bag. A goldfish flopped onto the patio stones, scales catching the dying light, gasping.

She stared at it. This was David's fish, from the tank she'd made him leave when he moved out. The fox had been stealing them, one by one, from the neighbor's pond where he'd secretly transferred his collection rather than let her have them.

The fox watched her, intelligent eyes unblinking.

"You too," she said softly. "Running off with things that aren't yours."

She thought about picking up the fish, putting it in water, saving it. Instead she sat on the porch steps and watched it struggle, this tiny, beautiful thing fighting for breath in the wrong element. She thought about vitamins, about how they promised to fix what was broken. How she'd spent a decade marketing them. How David had left anyway.

The fish stopped moving as the last of the orange light faded from the sky.

The fox approached slowly, head tilted, waiting for her reaction. Elena reached out, and for a moment, she thought it might bite her. Instead, it pressed its nose against her palm, wild and warm and alive.

"Eat up," she whispered.

She went inside and took two vitamin D tablets instead of one. Some things, she decided, you didn't fix. You just survived them.