What We Keep

Mara stood in the kitchen, chopping spinach with rhythmic precision. The knife's thud against the cutting board was the only sound in the apartment. Three years after David's death, she'd learned to live in the quiet.

"You look like a zombie," her sister had said earlier that day, reaching to smooth a strand of hair from Mara's face. "When was the last time you slept?"

Mara had pulled away. She hated how people touched her now—like she might break, like she was something fragile instead of something hollowed out and still walking.

The spinach would go into the quiche David used to make. His recipe, handwritten in his careful, slanted script, was taped inside the cupboard door. She'd cooked it every Sunday since the funeral, waiting for it to taste like something other than grief. It never did.

A fox screamed outside—a sharp, unearthly sound that made her drop the knife. She pressed her palms against the counter and breathed. In the stories David told, foxes were tricksters, messengers between worlds. She'd never believed in that sort of thing, but she found herself at the window anyway, searching the dark.

Nothing moved except the wind in the old oak tree.

They'd buried David on his thirty-fifth birthday. He'd joked once that he wanted to live forever, become one of those people who refused to age gracefully. Instead he'd left her with nothing but photographs and a spinach quiche recipe and a closet full of his shirts that she still couldn't bring herself to donate.

She caught her reflection in the window glass. The hair at her temples had started coming in silver during the first months after his death. People told her it looked distinguished. She thought it looked like she'd been through something that took pieces of her and didn't give them back.

The oven timer beeped.

Mara slid the quiche in and watched through the glass door as the crust began to brown. Somewhere in the distance, the fox screamed again, closer this time. She stood there until the smell of burning filled the kitchen, until the smoke alarm's wail broke through her zombie state, until she finally had to move.

She opened a window. The cold air hit her face, and for the first time in three years, she didn't immediately turn away.