Vitamin Fox

The divorce lawyer had told her to take a **vitamin** supplement for stress, something to help with the hollow feeling that had taken up residence in her chest. Maya stood in the supplement aisle at CVS at 11 PM on a Tuesday, reading labels through blurred vision, while her phone lit up with another text from David asking if she'd moved his golf clubs.

She bought nothing and drove instead to the old quarry pond where they'd swum as teenagers, before everything got complicated. The moon hung low over the **water**, silver and indifferent. Maya stripped to her underwear and waded in, the cold shocking her lungs awake. She began **swimming** toward the center, each stroke a question she couldn't quite form: who was she without him? Without the life they'd built?

Then she saw it—a **fox** standing at the water's edge, its coat burning copper against the darkness. It watched her with eyes that held centuries of wild knowing. Maya tread water, suspended between two worlds. The fox didn't run. It simply observed, as if understanding that some transformations require witnesses.

They stayed like that for minutes or hours. Finally, Maya swam back to shore, shivering but somehow clear. The fox vanished into the night as she emerged from the **water**, leaving droplets that felt like baptisms on her skin. She drove home and finally called David back, not about the golf clubs, but to say she'd be out by the weekend. Some things, she realized, you can't supplement. Some things you have to grow yourself, wild and stubborn, like a fox in the darkness.