The Year of Exposure

Marie stood before the bathroom mirror, scissors in hand. At forty-two, after fifteen years of marriage to a man who'd left her for a yoga instructor named Brianna, she was finally cutting her hair. The shoulder-length chestnut waves fell into the sink like brown dead things.

Downstairs, Barnaby—Richard's sphinx cat, whom Marie had secretly despised but now couldn't abandon—wailed. The creature looked like a naked mole rat with an attitude problem, all wrinkled skin and enormous ears. Richard had called him 'an ancient Egyptian soul.' Marie called him 'a test of her capacity for forgiveness.'

She'd told Richard to take the cat. He'd said Barnaby needed stability during the transition. The yoga instructor was allergic.

Marie's hair now fell in jagged angles around her face. She looked wild, foreign to herself. There was something terrifying about it—like being flayed, exposed. She'd kept her long hair since college, a safety net, a way to hide.

The timer beeped from the kitchen. She'd made spinach for dinner, alone, again. Sautéed with garlic and too much salt, because Richard had always complained about sodium and she was done with complaints.

She sat at the kitchen table, the sphinx cat winding around her legs, its naked body warm against her ankles. The spinach was bitter. She ate it anyway, tears finally coming—not because she missed Richard, but because she'd spent half her life becoming smaller for someone else, and now she didn't know how to be big.

Barnaby leapt onto the table, nudging her hand. His naked belly pressed against her wrist. Vulnerable. Unprotected. Completely himself.

'Me too,' she whispered to the cat. 'I'm exposed too.'