The Year of Electric Oranges

The cat hasn't eaten since Tuesday. Sarah's cat — Milo — sits by the door, waiting. I keep buying the expensive food, the kind Sarah swore by, but he turns his nose up at it.

I carefully sort through the medicine cabinet, counting the vitamin D supplements Dr. Martinez recommended after the funeral. 'Seasonal depression,' she'd said, like grief could be solved with a daily pill. I dry-swallow one, chase it with lukewarm water from the tap that still tastes faintly of the house's old pipes.

The storm comes without warning — the sky tearing itself open, lightning cracking so close the house shudders. I watch from the kitchen window, rain slashing against the glass in violent sheets, and for a second, I'm seven years old again, crouched in the hallway while my mother breathes through a panic attack in the bathroom.

Then I see it: an orange, bright and impossible against the gray deluge, rolling across the backyard. Sarah used to do that — toss oranges over the fence for the deer, a ritual I'd found charming and irrational in equal measure. I find myself at the back door, barefoot, unlocking it before I can think better of stepping into the freezing downpour.

The orange is perfect when I retrieve it from the wet grass, unblemished, glowing like something radioactive in the storm-dark. I peel it in the kitchen while water drips from my hair onto the linoleum, and the scent that rises is violently itself — sharp, sweet, the essence of something that never asked to be understood.

Milo appears, winding around my legs, purring. I offer him a segment. He eats it from my palm.

Maybe that's all grief is — learning to live with the things that survive you. The vitamins, the cat, the oranges rolling through storms. The way lightning illuminates everything for one terrible, beautiful second before leaving you in the dark again.

I finish the orange in the quiet kitchen, sticky fingers and all. It tastes like electricity, like loss, like something finally, honestly, real.