What We Feed

The bull wore her husband's face when she dreamed, though she hadn't seen Mark in three months. Their separation had been clean, surgical—no children, just his vinyl collection and her plants, divided like conquered territories.

Now she sat in her apartment at 2 AM, her cat Bast weaving between her legs with demanding yowls. On the floor, the neighbor's dog—a rescue with scars like terrain lines—slept beside his bowl. She'd been feeding both animals for weeks since the neighbor stopped coming home. The mail piled up. The dog's whining through thin walls had driven her to investigate, finding him gaunt but alive.

Her iPhone illuminated the room with another notification. Mark again. *Can we talk?* She'd stopped reading past the first three words.

She thought about the bull—Mark's grandfather's ranch, where they'd spent their anniversary. He'd chased her through the pasture while she'd laughed, breathless, until they'd collapsed in the dust, staring up at vast sky while the massive animal watched them from fifty yards away, placid as judgment. *Bull in a china shop,* Mark had whispered against her neck. *That's us.*

The cable guy had come yesterday to install her internet service. Young, competent, eyes that lingered on her left hand's bare ring finger. *Someone's loss,* he'd said, wrapping the coaxial cable with efficient fingers.

She looked at the phone again. Mark wasn't a bad man. He'd just become someone she didn't recognize—distant, distracted, his affection like water seeping through cracked plaster, present but meaningless. Their marriage had become a series of negotiations: whose turn to buy toilet paper, which restaurant for Friday dinners, how to pretend they weren't lonely together.

The dog whined in his sleep. She'd renamed him Ghost—because that's what they both were, echoes of something that had mattered once.

She typed: *Not tonight.*

Then deleted it.

Then typed: *Feed the cat.*

Sent.

The bull still wore Mark's face in her dreams. But in her kitchen, with Ghost's steady breathing and Bast's satisfied purr, she was beginning to remember what it felt like to be hungry again.