What Bears Know

The morning Ella started taking vitamin D supplements was the morning after she slept with Marcus. She stood in her bathroom at 6 AM, staring at the orange plastic bottle—something about strengthening bones, supporting immunity—while the man who wasn't quite her boyfriendanymore showered in the next room.

Marcus called her 'fox' the first time they met at the office holiday party three years ago. 'You've got that fox energy,' he'd said, nursing a drink she now knew was his third of the night. 'Cunning. Always three steps ahead.' She'd laughed, thinking it was a compliment. Now she understood: he meant she was something to be hunted, something that would make his wall look more interesting.

The bear was different. The bear was Arthur, her boss, who hibernated through quarterly meetings only to emerge ravenous and territorial. Arthur who would lean too close in the elevator, his breath smelling of coffee and something she couldn't identify until last month—when she found the divorce papers scattered across his desk like dead leaves.

'Do you think bears know they're scary?' Ella asked Marcus that night, the night before the vitamins.

Marcus had laughed, his hand already moving to her waist. 'Bears don't think, Ells. They just are.'

She should have asked: 'Do you think foxes know when they're being hunted?'

Instead, she let him stay. Let him pretend this was still something sustainable, something that didn't require supplements or artificial light or the way she began taking lunch breaks alone, sitting on a park bench watching office workers stream past like migrating animals.

The bottle said take one daily with food. She took three.

Three weeks later, Arthur cornered her in the breakroom. 'Marcus says you two are...' His pause stretched thin and hungry. 'Complicated.'

Ella thought about vitamins, about what it meant to need something manufactured to feel whole. About foxes and bears and the way some ecosystems required extinction.

'I'm not hungry anymore,' she said.

Arthur blinked. Marcus packed his things that night. Ella kept the vitamins but stopped taking them. Some deficiencies, she decided, were worth having.