What We Fed the Hollow Places

I arrange Peter's morning supplements on the granite counter—vitamin D, zinc, CoQ10—each a tiny promise in a gelatin shell. The fertility specialist calls it "optimizing our chances," but after three years of temperature charts and timed intercourse, these rituals feel less like science and more like superstition. Like rubbing a rabbit's foot, only expensive and medically endorsed.

I chop spinach for our morning smoothies, the leaves already wilting under my knife, everything destined to be pulverized into something nourishing but unappetizing. Peter watches from the kitchen island, still handsome at forty-two, his hair silvering at the temples in a way that makes him look distinguished rather than old. He used to watch baseball on Sunday afternoons, back when we believed our lives would follow some predictable trajectory—job, house, kids, grandkids. Now the television stays dark, and we fill our weekends with home improvement projects and silence.

The fox appears at dusk, a flash of copper at the edge of our backyard. She's got a kit with her, teaching it to hunt in the gathering dark. I watch them through the kitchen window, the mother patient and precise, her offspring clumsy and earnest. Peter comes up behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist.

"Think they're trying for a second litter?" he asks, and I can hear the exhaustion in his voice.

"I think they're just living," I say.

The fox looks up at us, wild eyes meeting ours through the glass, and I feel something crack open in my chest. This world is so full of things we cannot control—wildness, loss, the way bodies betray us, the way hope curdles into something that tastes like despair.

"I don't want to do the shots this month," I say, and it's the first time I've admitted it out loud.

Peter presses his forehead against my shoulder. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

We stand there watching the fox family until they disappear into the woods, carrying their small wild lives into the dark. Later, I'll throw away the spinach and the vitamins. Later, we'll turn on the baseball game and remember who we were before this hunger ate us hollow. But for now, we just watch, and let ourselves be empty together.