The Vitamin of Empty Rooms

The cat had been dead for three weeks when Margaret finally cleaned out the apartment. Dust motes floated in the afternoon light like suspended memories. On the closet shelf, she found his old fedora—a hat he'd worn to their anniversary dinners, the one that made him look like a detective from a noir film he'd never watched. She pressed it to her face, inhaling the faint scent of clove cigarettes and the papaya cologne she'd bought him for Christmas, back when they still made gestures like that.

The bear rug lay where it had for seventeen years—a trophy from his hunting days before he'd become vegan, before he'd become anything else. Margaret remembered running her toes through its fur during movie nights, the way he'd joked that the bear would come back to life if she didn't moisturize it. Now it was just dead skin in a room that felt increasingly like a tomb.

She found the bottle on his nightstand—vitamin D supplements, the gel capsules yellow as summer sunshine. The prescription was dated two weeks before his death. "For bone health," the note said. But she knew the truth: he'd been researching early onset Alzheimer's, convinced his forgetfulness wasn't just stress or aging. He hadn't wanted to worry her.

The cat had been his idea too—a companionship pet, he'd called it, when the children moved out. Sir Purrs-a-Lot had outlived him by six years, a testament to the quiet spite of animals. Margaret had buried the cat in the backyard beneath the oak tree, beside the hole she'd dug for him before the hospice nurse reminded her that bodies go to funeral homes.

She placed the hat on the bear. It looked absurd. Everything looked absurd now—her life, this apartment, the papaya tree in the yard that produced fruit neither of them liked. She took a vitamin D capsule and swallowed it without water. Let her bones break. Let them all break.

Downstairs, the phone rang. Probably one of the children checking in, or the hospice center calling about a survey. Margaret let it ring. In the silence, she could almost hear him whispering that she looked beautiful in that dress, the one with the stain on the hem from the papaya she'd dropped the night he told her he was sick.

The cat, the hat, the bear, the papaya, the vitamin—all of it just objects, just things. But things were all that was left.