What Lightning Takes

Eleanor stood before the bathroom mirror, scissors in hand, while the storm outside battered against the glass. She was forty-three, and somewhere in the last decade of friendship with Mara, she had forgotten who she was.

She lifted a lock of her hair—dark brown, like Mara's had been before the chemo took it all. That was three years ago. Eleanor had sat by her hospital bed every day, had held her hand while Mara's body hollowed out, had listened to her friend's bitterness about dying young and unloved. And then, two weeks before the end, Mara had confessed: she'd slept with Eleanor's husband. Not once. For three years.

The thunder made the window rattle. Eleanor opened the scissors.

Outside, something moved in the garden—a fox, its coat burnished copper in the darkness. It paused, looking back at her with eyes like old gold, before disappearing into the rain. Mara had collected fox figurines. Had called Eleanor her clever little vixen whenever she'd defended her, had lied for her, had covered her tracks.

Lightning fractured the sky, flooding the bathroom with harsh white light. In that merciless illumination, Eleanor saw what she'd become: hollowed out by grief and rage, her fine lines etched deep around eyes that had spent too long looking away from truth.

She closed the scissors around a thick section of hair at shoulder length and cut. The sound was sharp, final.

Another flash of lightning showed her reflection transformed. She looked wild, exposed, older somehow but more real. She kept cutting until her hair grazed her jawline, fell in jagged pieces around her face. It wasn't a salon cut. It was butchery, liberation.

The fox returned, pausing again at the edge of the garden. This time, Eleanor met its gaze.

She thought about what Mara had whispered from her deathbed: "I needed to know I was still alive."

Eleanor had nodded, had kissed her forehead, had held her while she died. Had buried her with full honors, had comforted Mara's weeping mother, had kept the truth like a stone in her throat.

She set down the scissors. Rain lashed against the house, wind howled through the eaves, and the fox watched her from the darkness with ancient, knowing eyes. Eleanor washed the pieces of her old self down the sink drain, watching them swirl away in the water.

Tomorrow she would call Thomas. She would tell him she knew. She would change the locks. She would sell the house they'd bought together, the one with the garden where foxes sometimes came.

Tonight, she would stand in the harsh light of the bathroom and learn to recognize the woman in the mirror. Lightning had burned away everything false. Only the survivor remained.