Unspooled

The cat showed up on Mia's fire escape the same week her friend Daniel stopped calling. She named it Bear because it growled like thunder whenever she opened the window to leave food. Bear was scrawny, ribs visible through matted fur, survivor of something Mia couldn't name but recognized.

She sat on her apartment floor surrounded by vitamin bottles—B12 for exhaustion, D for winter darkness, ashwagandha for anxiety—that her doctor prescribed after she confessed she couldn't feel anything anymore. At work, she untangled cables behind server racks, restoring connections between strangers while her own life frayed.

"You're bearing up," Daniel had told her last year, when she got the promotion that required moving to a city where she knew no one. He meant it kindly, but his voice had thinned, stretched like old wire.

Bear began waiting by the window. Mia started leaving it open. One night, the cat climbed inside, circling her legs. She wept into its rough fur, something shifting in her chest like a cable finally snapping.

Three weeks later, Daniel called. "I'm in town."

He stood in her doorway carrying a bottle of vitamins—iron, he'd remembered her deficiency—and said, "I couldn't be your friend anymore because I wanted to be more."

Bear wound through his legs, purring. Mia looked at the years of cables she'd knotted around herself, all the signals she'd refused to transmit clearly. She touched Daniel's face, letting herself receive what she'd spent years avoiding.

"Stay," she said.

The cat settled between them, and for the first time in months, Mia took nothing to help her sleep.