The Vitamins of Survival

Marie stared at the bottle of prenatal vitamins on her counter. Three years post-divorce and still taking them—habit, hope, some combination she couldn't untangle. Her phone buzzed. Greg.

"Can we talk?"

Outside, snow fell in thick waves. She'd come to this Montana cabin to disappear, not reconcile. But the isolation made her answer.

"I'm not ready to come back."

"I'm not asking that. I just—I saw that cat we adopted. The one you took."

Her chest tightened. Barnaby was probably the only thing she'd fought for in the divorce that actually mattered. "What about him?"

"He died. Last week."

Silence stretched like a physical thing. She remembered finding Barnaby as a stray, Greg saying they couldn't afford a pet, how he'd secretly grown to love him more than she had.

"Marie? You there?"

"I'm here."

"I keep thinking about what you said. About how we were just two lonely people afraid to admit it."

She looked out the window. Something moved at the tree line—huge, dark. A bear. The rental had warned about them.

"I see a bear," she said.

"What?"

"At the edge of the woods. It's watching me."

"Remember Yellowstone?" Greg's voice softened. "When we got between that sow and her cubs?"

"We ran for twenty minutes."

"You threw your iPhone at her."

"It was all I had."

"I still think about that," he said. "How we ran together. How we didn't let go."

The bear moved closer. Marie trembled.

"Greg, it's coming toward the cabin."

"Lock the doors. Marie, seriously."

She watched through the glass—massive, improbable, something that shouldn't exist this close to human things. The vitamin bottle caught her eye. She'd bought them wanting something to grow, something to protect. But maybe survival wasn't about that. Maybe it was about what you ran toward.

"Marie? You okay?"

"I'm thinking about Barnaby," she said.

"What?"

"How he spent his life afraid of everything. But when I got sick, he slept on my chest for three days. Didn't leave."

The bear turned then, shuffling back into the trees like it had never been there. Like danger was something you could walk away from if you timed it right.

"Greg?"

"Yeah."

"Maybe we start with the running part."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

She took a vitamin, swallowed it without water. Something about rituals. Something about beginning again.