What We Carry

The dog died three weeks ago. Sarah found the body first—Buster, golden retriever, fourteen years of unquestioning devotion curled stiff on the kitchen linoleum. She hadn't cried. She'd just stared at her phone, thumb scrolling through emails while I wrapped him in the old orange blanket we'd bought at a hardware store in Ohio, back when we still believed in fixing things.

Now she sits across from me at the water's edge, lake stretching flat and dark toward a horizon bleeding the last bruised colors of sunset. She's wearing that fox fur coat her mother left her, the one she never takes off anymore, like she's armored herself against everything soft.

"It's the weight," she says, not looking at me. "That's what you don't understand."

"I understand weight."

"No you don't." She turns then, and her eyes are empty as the water lapping at our feet. "You think it's about the dog. You think it's about your mother dying last spring. You think it's about the promotion you didn't get." She laughs, dark and sharp. "It's all of it. It's the accumulated years of bearing it."

I watch an orange leaf drift past on the surface, carried toward some distant shore. "So what? We just—what? Stop bearing it?"

"I stopped months ago." She stands up, the fox coat catching what's left of the light. "I've been walking around hollowed out, pretending. And you haven't noticed because you're too busy bearing everything yourself to see I'm not there anymore."

The dog's death was just the最后 crack. The dog was the last thing that believed in us.

"Where will you go?"

"Anywhere the water isn't so deep." She walks back toward the house without looking back, and I sit alone as true dark comes down, carrying everything I cannot put down.