What We Carry

The bottle of prenatal vitamins sat on her nightstand for six months before he finally moved them to the medicine cabinet. Each capsule was a tiny monument to everything they couldn't say to each other—the disappointment that had calcified into silence, the way they'd stopped asking 'what if' and started accepting 'this is it.'

Their cat, Luna, sensed the hollow spaces first. She stopped sleeping between them, choosing instead the windowsill where she could watch birds—something alive and moving, unlike the stillness that had settled over their bed. He caught himself talking to the cat more than his wife some nights, confessing fears he couldn't speak aloud to another human being.

'It's like being mauled by a bear,' she said one evening, not looking up from her book. 'The actual attack is terrible, but the recovery—that's what kills you. That's when you realize how much you've lost.'

He'd never told her about his brother who'd died in the woods, but somehow she knew. She knew about the dreams where he couldn't run fast enough, the weight of something wild and heavy on his chest.

'The bear didn't kill him,' he said quietly. 'The infection did. The things left untreated.'

She closed her book then. Luna jumped down from the windowsill and wound between them, and for the first time in months, they both reached for the cat simultaneously. Their hands brushed against each other's fur, warm and electric with recognition.

'The vitamins,' she whispered. 'I was going to throw them out.'

'Keep them,' he said, and the words felt like coming up for air. 'Maybe we'll need them someday. Maybe we won't.'

The cat purred against their joined hands, and outside, something howled in the distance—not a bear, not anymore, but something that had learned to live with its own hunger.