The Vitamin Supplicant

The cabin sat on the edge of the lake like a confession half-spoken. Mara watched from the deck as a fox darted through the tall grass, its red coat brilliant against the dying light of October. Something about the creature's determined movement made her chest tighten.

Inside, David was sorting pills on the kitchen table. The vitamin bottles clinked like small glass bells—D3, B-complex, magnesium, the growing pharmacopeia of midlife.

"You're staring again," he said without looking up.

"I'm thinking."

"About what?"

"About how we used to be people who made decisions."

David's mouth tightened. That was the thing about twenty years of marriage—the words you didn't say formed a second language between you. The bear had come through their property twice that summer, a lumbering phantom that left the trash cans scattered like evidence of some nightly investigation. Mara had woken each time to David's hand on her shoulder, his whisper: "Go back to sleep."

She hadn't. She'd lay there listening to his breathing, wondering which of them was hibernating and which was merely asleep.

Now she stood and walked to the lake's edge. The water was darkening, taking on the bruised purple of evening. She thought about the coaxial cable they'd buried last year, threading it through the earth like a metal worm, bringing the internet to their wilderness retreat. Connection delivered through a wire, suspended beneath the soil.

"Mara."

She turned. David stood in the doorway, backlit by the kitchen's warm glow. For a moment he looked like a stranger, or perhaps the person he'd been before—before the diagnosis, before the mortgage, before the quiet accumulation of years.

"The fox came back," she said.

"I know."

"It took something."

David stepped onto the deck. "What did it take?"

Mara looked at him really looked at him—at the lines around his eyes, the way his shoulders had begun to curl forward, the pills in his hand.

"I don't know," she said. "But I think we should find out."

The fox emerged from the shadows then, something dangling from its jaws—a fish, silver and flashing. It paused, watching them with ancient, indifferent eyes before vanishing into the dark.

David's hand found hers. His palm was warm, the skin familiar as his own name.

"Tomorrow," he said.

"Tomorrow," she agreed.

The water lapped against the shore, patient as heartbeat.