What the Storm Leaves Behind

Elena had been running for forty minutes when the sky turned that sickly yellow-green that promises violence. Her lungs burned, but not as much as the hollow space in her chest where three years of living with Mark used to be. She'd found his favorite hat—the brown fedora he'd worn to their first date—tucked in the back of her closet that morning. Just seeing it there, mocking her with memories, had sent her fleeing into the rain.

The first lightning strike hit somewhere behind her, close enough that the hair on her arms stood up. She should turn back. She'd run five miles already. But something about the storm felt like permission—to be messy, to be undone, to let the weather match what roiled inside her.

That's when she saw the cat—a gaugy tabby huddled beneath the porch of an abandoned house three blocks from hers. Elena had never noticed the house before, though she'd lived in this neighborhood for six years. The cat mewled, a sound so pitiful it cracked something open in her chest.

"You too?" she whispered, kneeling as rain began to fall in earnest.

She gathered the cat into her jacket, its frail heartbeat against her chest like a second pulse. They huddled together on that porch as the storm broke overhead—lightning fracturing the sky every thirty seconds, thunder shaking the rotten wood beneath them.

The cat wasn't hers. She wasn't even a cat person. But in that moment, as the bear of her grief finally rose up inside her—massive and terrifying—she realized she didn't have to carry it alone anymore. She could bear this. She would bear this, one breath at a time, with this terrified creature depending on her.

"Okay," she said to the cat, to the storm, to herself. "Okay."

When the lightning finally stopped and the rain softened to a drizzle, Elena walked home with the cat wrapped in her jacket like a secret. Mark's hat still sat on her bedside table where she'd thrown it that morning. She'd return it tomorrow. But tonight, she had someone else to take care of. Tonight, she wasn't running anymore.